Just like there is no “year of electric cars” or “year of razor blades” or “year of the Greek yogurt,” there is no “year of mobile” or “year of this or that.” However, as we have seen over the 30+ years of mobile evolution, the next year is better than the previous one and so on and so forth. So, 2013 ends in the long tradition and continuum of human endeavor to make significant progress in multiple mobile dimensions and make an impact on individuals and societies alike. 2013 proved that connectivity has become the core of our fabric and we are entering the “connected intelligence era” that will enable the Golden Age of Mobile.

In no particular order, here were some highlights of mobile 2013:

Number of mobile subscriptions ~ humans: the total number of mobile subscriptions got tantalizing close to the number of humans on the planet. Next year, we will go past the milestone but it shows the pervasiveness and strength of the mobile technology that it has become the basic part of our Maslow’s hierarchy.

More data please: As smartphones approach the 2B mark, the data appetite ofconsumers showed no signs of abating. In Sweden, the mobile broadband subs are consuming over 7GB/mo. In the US, some Android devices are consuming over 4 GB/mo on average. Operators will need to continue to refine their pricing and margin models as the demand for more spectrum will continue.

The dominance of Samsung and Apple: The tussles in the device segment has all the intrigue and juxtaposition of a Shakespearean drama and the ups and downs of a Pavarotti’s masterpiece. Through sheer muscle tenacity and the execution speed of Usain Bolt, Samsung was able to firmly dominate 2013 despite Apple’s grip on the high-end smartphone market. These two account for almost 50% of the smartphone shipments and almost all of the profits in the space. Apple continued to set the tone for the market with the launches of new iPhones and iPads. Though iOS trails Android in raw deployment, it trounces it in consumer usage. It is also remarkable how quickly consumers upgrade to the latest iOS in stark contrast with the Android fragmentation. Apple finally got access to the big Chinese market.

The disappearance of the legacy device brands: Nokia, Motorola, and RIM were dominant players a few years ago but Apple ensured the smartphone script is rewritten. They all made serious strategic errors one after another and while Nokia and Motorola have found new families to host their aspirations, their story should be a reminder of the turbulent cycles of the device business and that the complacency virus spares no one. The rise of the local OEMs should keep everyone on their toes in 2014.

Android juggernaut: In 2013, Android continued to create distance with Apple in terms of downloads, easily going past the mind boggling 1 billion milestone. Android has changed the industry for the better. While there is trouble in the house, Android will continue to play a major role in the device and app ecosystem in 2014.

The digital revenue streams are very distributed with diverse players such as Facebook, Twitter, Starbucks, Expedia, Uber, Pandora, Amazon, AT&T, Telefonica, Verizon, DoCoMo, Netflix, China Mobile, Rovio, Square, Softbank, Ebay, Hertz, Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In our work with players around the world this year, it is clear that there is significant energy and application in mining the opportunities on the 4th wave. With nascent efforts in Bhutan, Vietnam, Malaysia to moonshots in the US and Europe, mobile is rewriting the rules in virtually every industry. Fasten your seat belts for another fast paced year in 2014.

Post-PC beat PC+: Apple expertly wrote the post-PC narrative and while the PC+ crowd has a legit argument, perception is often reality and there in no doubt that from here on out, the industry will be talking about the post-PC world in one voice. Even Microsoft will grudgingly admit to the transition and likely shift its strategy accordingly. As we wrote long time ago, Tablets have fundamentally altered the computing paradigm. In our SMB research released earlier this year, it was clear that smartphones and tablets are the tools of choice for the enterprise and that is not only altering the device business but also the software landscape. Mobile broadband, the cloud, and the applications are altering the enterprises – big and small. Microsoft should take solace from a tough year of progress. Blackberry is practically done and Microsoft has established itself as the distant but a viable third mobile ecosystem. Had it not been for a series of strategic mistakes, Microsoft might have made better inroads in 2013.

LTE launches: LTE is the fastest growing generation of cellular technology in the history. With over 250 networks launched, the desire to launch IP networks quickly is on top of the agenda. US leads with all major operators having substantial LTE deployments but other nations are fast catching up. While there has been quite a bit of focus on LTE, WiFi has been emerging as the white knight and its importance only grew in 2013 with 60-70% of the mobile data traffic being carried by WiFi networks in most of the countries. It might lead to some interesting business models in the coming years. 5G entered the industry lexicon.

M&As: It is natural for fast growing and competitive industries to consolidate. 2013 wasn’t any different. There were some blockbuster and expected M&As: Microsoft acquired Nokia, Softbank surprised with Sprint/Clearwire acquisition, Verizon finally got hold of its destiny from Vodafone. As we have eluded to several times in our past research notes, we expect the global M&A to continue with several block buster deals slated for 2014. Stay tuned.

Regulatory tussles: Regulators are generally always behind in understanding a fast growing industry. It was clear in 2013, that the convergence of the computing and communications world has left the regulatory world woefully short of expertise and imagination. Governments around the world will do better by hiring folks from the industry to get a grip of the fast-paced every-changing dynamics of the mobile world as the very competitiveness of a nation depends on it. From spectrum to privacy, from competition to commerce, regulators need to get up to speed on unexpected trajectories of the new world.

Security and Privacy: From Snowden revelations to industrial espionage, from credit card data loss to enterprise security, the security and privacy of mobile data, applications, networks, and devices became front and center of the security and privacy debate.

Operator disruption plays: In the telecom space, the #4 player generally doesn’t have a big impact on the overall mechanics of the industry. However, when it has nothing to lose, it can provide a potent dose of disruption to the market. Free in France and T-Mobile in the US were examples of that this year. In France, by offering cheap mobile data services at low margins, the newcomer altered the economics of the segment tumbling the incumbent revenues by 10%. In the US, through a series of financial and marketing maneuvers, T-Mobile was able to alter its net-add trajectory and had meaningful sub gains for the first time in three years. Also, for the first time, T-Mobile forced the top three to react to its moves and not the other way around. It also inspired other smaller players in other countries to rethink their strategies.

Connected devices: The promise of M2M and connected devices has been there for some time. Internet of Things has morphed into the gimmicky Internet of Everything. While the hockey stick curve hasn’t arrived yet, there was plenty to celebrate with the introductions of Google Glasses, wearables, smart watches, connected autos, glamorous thermostats, winking light bulbs, home security and energy management solutions and much more. GE is spending billions for its “industrial Internet” initiative. A nice platform has been set for continued feverish growth and product introductions in 2014.

Mobile’s impact on commerce: Mobile is changing every industry but its impact on commerce is particularly notable. In the 2013 holiday season (according to IBM), mobile made 17% of the online sales increasing over 55% from 2012. Tablet users spent $126/order.

Meteoric rise of mobile apps: In 2010, we evaluated the impact mobile apps will have on the industry. Much of the growth has been expected, however the players who lead in revenue and downloads have fluctuated across the various platforms. In 2013, Google started to match Apple in downloads though Apple easily wins in the revenues category and thus still remains more attractive to the developers though the gap is closing.

There was much more – Twitter IPO, Surface, Moto X, spectrum scandals, Facebook’s love for mobile, Google mobile advertising dominance, the rise of the Chinese OEMs, decline of HTC, and several other events captivated our attention.

I am positive that 2014 is going to be another terrific year for mobile. The progress and surprises will come from all quarters. New players will emerge, new business models will take hold, and we will make significant progress. I am also sure that you all will do your part in shaping the mobile cosmos.

First things first. From all of us at Chetan Sharma Consulting, we wish you and yours a very happy, healthy, and prosperous 2013. My thanks to all who participated in our 2013 Mobile Predictions Annual Survey. It gives our community an insider’s view of the trends and predictions for the New Year.

2012 was a terrific year for the mobile industry. Mobile data continued to drive most of the mobile growth around the world. Mobile also started impacting every major vertical industry around the globe. In fact, mobile has become so ingrained in the fabric of business productivity and social interaction that it is not longer the new growth engine, it has become the engine.

The competitive dynamics stayed quite vibrant in 2012. We saw epic battles in the markets as well as in the courts. 2012 also saw the PC value chain struggling for relevance while the smartphones and tablets unit sales captured all the attention and headlines.

As we peer into 2013, we will see the total number of cellular subscriptions eclipsing humans on the planet. The connected device made steady progress. Anything that should be connected is being connected - creating a web of new opportunities and challenges.

LTE has become the fastest deployed cellular technology in the approximately 35 year history of the industry. Broadband combined with connected devices and applications are changing the way we live, we interact with others, do business, and consume information.

The European economic crisis impacted many players especially the large telcos, making the transition to digital ever more urgent. As voice and messaging revenue curves decline and access revenue approaches its high mark in the next few years, investment in the fourth curve becomes critical for all players.

Our annual survey is a way for us to engage our community on the trends for the next year. We put some of the pressing questions to our colleagues and industry leaders. We are able to glean some valuable insights from their choices and comments, some tangible shifts, and get a sense of what’s to come. Executives, developers, and insiders (n=200) from leading mobile companies and startups from across the value chain and from around the world participated to help see what 2013 might bring to keep us on our toes. What makes this survey unique is that it draws upon the collective wisdom of folks who are at the center of the mobile evolution. The survey provides a view of how they see the upcoming year for mobile.

30 names were randomly drawn for the limited edition of the Mobile Future Forward 2012 book. The winners are:

Ryan Carney, UX, Gfk

Wes Biggs, CTO, Adfonic

Volker Hirsch, Head of BD, RIM

Bobby Morrison, President, Verizon Wireless

Chris Walls, Strategy, Huawei

Von Cameron, EVP, Smith Micro

Sami Makelainen, Manager, Telstra

Martin Fichter, VP, HTC

Jeff Hasen, CMO, Hipcricket

Paul Brody, VP, IBM

Michael Mullany, CEO, Sencha

Mick Welch, Manager, Nokia

Jana Messerschmidt, VP, Twitter

Akio Orii, SVP, Toyota

Gina Bovara, Software Services, Intel

Mark Brill, Lead Partner, Brand Emotivity

Stuart Saunders, CEO, Mobile Defense

Tony Greco, Director, ZTE

Venu Vasudevan, Sr. Director, Motorola

Elliott Hamilton, Sr. Director, TeleCommunication Systems

Biljana Jovicic, VAS, Digitel

Robin Jewsbury, Cofounder, Promoht

Julie Dey, VP, Rootmetrics

Pat Nunally, VP, Upaid

Paul Upham, Director, Welldoc

Sagar Tamang, Director, Nielsen

Andrew Meadors, Engineer, Cisco

Nikao Yang, SVP, Adcolony

Pelle Larsen, Director, SingTel

Kelly Amsbry, Sr. Planner, Microsoft

Elisabeth Rainge, Head – Strategy, NSN

Thanks again to everyone who contributed. We will be calling on you again next year.

Be well, do good work, stay in touch, and stay away from Triskaidekaphobiacs.

Thanks and with warm wishes,

Chetan

What was most newsworthy in Mobile 2012?

2012 was a spectacular year for smartphones. Smartphones in most western nations are now over 80% of the devices sold every quarter. China will soon become the biggest market by unit volume and the rest of the world is catching up fast as we see sub-$50 Android devices flood the market. Apple vs. Samsung has become akin to Lakers vs. Celtics of the eighties or the India vs. Pakistan rivalry in cricket. The passion and intense competition between the two super powers was clearly the headline of the year. That pushed the Android vs. iOS tussles as the subheading for 2012. As we enter into 2013, the legacy computing aka PC players will need to reinvent themselves or expect substantial decline in their fortunes.

The role of mobile data in industry’s growth has been cemented by the insatiable appetite for higher speeds, more apps, and social interaction and is expected to continue at a feverish pace as LTE roles out around the world and the developing world catches up. We are likely to see the Apple and Google rivalry intensify. One is a master of hardware and the other of software. Both have their Achilles heel and much is at stake in the coming year. Many expect Microsoft’s Windows to make progress to lay claim to become a viable 3rd ecosystem. 2013 will try to answer that question.

Who will be the most open player in the mobile ecosystem in 2013?

Who are the top 4 important players in the mobile ecosystem?

Many in the industry talk about Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon as the most important platform players in the business today. However, when it comes to mobile, in addition to the defacto top-two, our survey picks Samsung as number three by a good margin. Samsung has become a strong player in the digital ecosystem that commands attention and respect. The top 10-15 global operators play a strong role in the mobile ecosystem and collectively edged out Amazon and others for the number four spot. Facebook and Microsoft while strong in the desktop world have a lot to prove to be considered a top tier player in mobile.

What will be the breakthrough categories in mobile in 2013?

Our industry seems fascinated with the potential of mobile payments and voted it to be the top mobile applications and services category for 2013. Given the importance of Cloud in all apps/services, it is no surprise that it is part of the top 2. Mobile Commerce, Big data, and connected devices rounded up the top 5.

What will be the most popular consumer mobile applications in 2013?

There are regional variations when it comes to the popularity and revenue potential of mobile applications. Messaging, mobile commerce, and social dominate the developing world while location based services replaces messaging in the developed world as the key mobile application. Mobile health and gaming made a strong show in both regions.

Which will be the most dominant tablet platform in 2 years?

So far, iOS has dominated the tablet landscape. With iPad, Apple has effectively carved out the mid-high tier of the tablet space. Android players are losing or barely making any revenue from this device category. Windows tablets are priced so high that it is trying to compete with laptops rather than the tablets. Our panel expects Android to catch-up in unit sales and iOS to dominate the revenues by good margins. Windows is likely to stay a marginal player.

Who will make the biggest mobile acquisition in 2013?

Microsoft and Google both have big cash balanced to make some sizable acquisitions in 2013. Microsoft lacks traction and attention and will try to make a move but which player can give them an edge? Apple also needs to beef up its software operations significantly but doesn’t have the history of big acquisitions. Operators are also looking to become OTT players themselves and might make moves to shore up their strategic interests. Many participants think that Nokia and RIM have seen their final year as an independent entity.

How will the "Apps vs. Mobile Web" debate shape up in 2013?

In 2012, many expected the resurgence of “mobile web” but it hasn’t panned out that way. Google has doubled up on apps, Facebook realized HTML5 isn’t going to cut it, and the expectations pendulum swung back to the apps and might stay there for 2013.

Who will dominate the mobile payment/commerce space?

Three years ago, mobile payments/commerce seemed to be the “blue ocean” opportunity but financial guys have firmly protected their turf, at least for now. Hopes were high for operator led initiatives but the enthusiasm has tapered off. Startups like Square are doing more to disrupt the payments space than some of the established players. The only exception is PayPal, which has so far been able to create good distance with the competitors. Microsoft has surprisingly been absent in a critical space.

Which solutions will gain the most traction for managing mobile data broadband consumption?

4G, mobile offload, and tiered pricing have been most effective in managing the costs of mobile data consumption though spectrum has garnered more of the noise share.

Which category will generate the most mobile data revenue in 2013?

Access dominates the developed world while messaging has the lion share in the developing world. We will see access becoming the dominant category in the emerging markets fairly soon.

Which European operator is likely to emerge stronger from the current economic climate?

European operators have been battered by struggling economy and regulatory changes. Many are rethinking their strategy, shedding off assets, and just trying to keep their head above water. The leaner operations and refocused strategic direction might help them recover better when the economy improves. While our global panel picked Vodafone to have the strongest recovery, our European panel picked Telefonica to emerge stronger.

When will mobile commerce be greater than ecommerce?

A majority of the panel thinks that mobile commerce will eclipse ecommerce in revenues generated by 2015 in North America and Asia and by 2020 for the rest of the world. There are already strong signs that commerce is shifting from online to mobile.

The company bringing the most successful mobile gadget of the year - 2012 and 2013?

Apple continues to produce the most desirable devices. iPhone and iPad dwarf everything else and easily was the company with the most successful gadget in 2012. However, the panel expects Samsung to best its rival in 2013. Google and Amazon might mount a credible challenge but their chances of producing something truly dominating remain low.

Which platform has a credible shot at becoming a viable and durable 3rd ecosystem in mobile?

Windows 8 phones finally launched in 2012. The design is solid, the OEM support is growing, the number of apps are rising and while it is still a long ways to becoming a credible 3rd ecosystem, it has the best shot at becoming one. The only rival seems the HTML5-based OS initiatives. The application developer community actually voted for HTML5 over Windows as the 3rd ecosystem that has some chance of competing with iOS and Android which completely dominate in revenues and unit sales respectively.

Mobile company of the year - 2012 and 2013?

Samsung eclipsed Nokia and Apple to become the most dominating device player in unit volume in almost all major markets. The speed with which it is churning out devices has pretty much crushed the rest of the Android ecosystem and is going head-to-head with Apple. For this performance, the panel voted Samsung to be the mobile company of the year for both 2012 and 2013 with Apple and Google close behind.

Which of the following are likely to happen in 2013?

The rumor chamber is ablaze with the possibilities of Apple TV, smartphones from Amazon and Microsoft, and data-only plans to make their appearance in 2013. Square and Twitter could be the hot acquisitions of the year though Twitter is likely to chose IPO glory. Will Samsung fork Android? Will Sprint and T-Mobile merge? Will European operators get acquired? These are some of the questions that are likely to keep the media on their toes this year.

Which operator is best positioned for the digital world?

As we outlined in our research paper “Operator’s Dilemma: The Fourth Wave,” the business of being a mobile operator is at a critical juncture and operators are investing heavily into creating the digital business. AT&T, Verizon, NTT DoCoMo, Softbank, and Telefonica are already generating billions of dollars from these initiatives and lead the operator contingent in the digital world.

Who was and will be the mobile person of the year?

In the past, Steve Jobs was consistently the person of the year in mobile. In 2012, Tim Cook effectively managed to produce record profits for the investors and navigated Apple to keep its “most valuable enterprise” title intact for the year. Apple is still the company on top of the hill. JK Shin of Samsung was voted number two for 2012. For 2013, the landscape changed. Our panel overwhelmingly voted Jeff Bezos to impress us the most in 2013. Amazon has done a good job disrupting the device model and with its strong commerce expertise, it is looking to take on both Google and Apple at the same time. Andy Rubin of Google with the 1 billion Android units milestone coming up this year will be a good contender for the title as well.

There were several other leaders who impressed in 2012 e.g. Paul Jacobs (eclipsing Intel in market cap), Jack Dorsey (disrupting the mobile payments market with Square), Masayoshi Son (for Sprint acquisition and global ambitions), Dan Hesse (for navigating Sprint through rough waters), Glenn Lurie and Matthew Key (for leading the digital transformation of the two giants – AT&T and Telefonica respectively), Rhen Zhengfei (for making Huawei into a dominating infrastructure provider), Lowell McAdam (for making Verizon the number 1 mobile data operator in the world) and Ralph de la Vega (for making AT&T the number 2 ahead of NTT DoCoMo).

All in all, a great collection of thoughts and comments. Thanks again to everyone who participated. Have a great 2013.

First things first. From all of us at Chetan Sharma Consulting, we wish you and yours a very happy, healthy, and prosperous 2012. My thanks to all who participated in our 2012 Mobile Predictions Annual Survey. It gives our community an insider’s view of trends.

2011 was a terrific year for the mobile industry. With all its ups and down, consumers embraced devices, applications, services, and technology with more gusto than ever before. In the waning hours of 2011, we crossed the 6 billion subscriptions milestone. While the first billion took 19 years, this last billion only took 15 months.

Smartphones are selling like hot cakes. We estimate that by the end of Q4 2011, over 60% of the devices sold in the US were smartphones and over 30% of the global sales were for the evolved brethren of the primordial featurephones. Sparked by insatiable consumer demand for mobile data, LTE and HSPA+ networks are sprouting all over the planet with US leading the charge for broadband deployment.

Our annual survey is a way for us to engage our community on the trends for the next year. We put some of the pressing questions to our colleagues and industry leaders. We are able to glean some valuable insights from their choices and comments, some tangible shifts, and get a sense of what’s to come. Executives, developers, and insiders (n=150) from leading mobile companies and startups from across the value chain and around the world participated to help see what 2012 might bring to keep us on our toes. What makes this survey unique is that it draws upon the collective wisdom of folks who are at the center of the mobile evolution.

Fifteen names were randomly drawn for the limited edition of the Mobile Future Forward 2011 book. The winners are:

Tor Bjorn Minde, Head of Ericsson Labs, Ericsson

Sunder Somasundaram, Industry Solutions Practice Director, AT&T

C. Enrique Ortiz, Mobile Technologist, About Mobility

Russell Buckley, CMO, Eagle Eye

Marianne Marck, VP – Engineering, Starbucks

John Foster, President, ZED USA

Angel Luis Saez, Sr. Director, Orange Spain

Dilip Mistry, Senior Director, Microsoft Asia

Phyllis Reuther, Advanced Analytics Lab, Sprint

Gene Keenan, VP of Mobile, Isobar

Elizabeth Day, Director of Finance, Trilogy International

Alan Cole, Research Staff Member, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

X J Wang, VP – GM China, Vesta Corp

Michelle Lee, Director, SK Telecom

Hemant Chandak, Sr. Analyst, Cisco Systems

Thanks again to everyone who contributed. We will be calling on you again next year. It has been a terrific year for us at Chetan Sharma Consulting and we are looking forward to an engaging and productive 2012.

Be well, do good work, and stay in touch.

Thanks and with warm wishes,

Your feedback is always welcome.

Thanks

Chetan Sharma

Now onto the 2012 Mobile Industry Predictions Survey Results.

1. What was most newsworthy in Mobile 2011?

Android had a spectacular rise in 2011 around the globe. Android OEMs collectively shipped the most number of devices and while margins shrank, they were able to put a united front to iOS. 2011 will always be remembered for the passing away of the industry transformer Steve Jobs. His work directly or indirectly touched billions of souls around the planet, many times over – something rarest of human beings are able to achieve in their life time. Regulatory tussles and significant increase in IP disputes also occupied the headlines. Amazon announced its intention for the mobile space with the launch of Kindle Fire.

2. What will be the biggest mobile stories of 2012?

As we look towards 2012, our panel voted for the continued growth of mobile data as the biggest story followed by Amazon’s entry into the mobile space. Some key questions for the year are: Will Microsoft/Nokia devices will make any meaningful progress? Will RIM survive the year? How does Google manage the fragmentation, decline in margins (for the OEMs), and the IP issues? Will any high-profile security and privacy mishaps lead to more regulatory entanglements? Facebook IPO and its mobile ambitions? How do operators manage the data demand? Which M&As will capture industry’s attention? Will Apple continue to dominate on both smartphone and tablet front? What does Apple do with mobile payments? and much more. Clearly, it is going to be a terrific year.

3. Who will be the most open player in the mobile ecosystem in 2012?

File this in the “perception is reality” folder. Despite all the criticism, Google has maintained its strong position as the most open player in the mobile industry.

4. What applications will define 4G?

Still looking for a killer-4G app? Video, cloud computing, and access will continue to drive 4G demand and growth.

5. What will be the breakthrough category in mobile in 2012?

For a second year in a row, the panel voted for mobile payments and mobile commerce as the top two category that will find their voice. Mobile advertising has become mainstream so it lost its ranking in the top 3.

6. What will be the most popular consumer mobile applications in 2012?

Apps preferences vary by regions depending on a whole range of factors. Messaging and Commerce are the top two categories for the developing world while consumers in the developed nations are likely to gravitate towards commerce and location based services.

7. Which will be the most dominant (unit sales) tablet platform in 2 years?

iOS and Android will dominate the tablet landscape for the next 24 months. A late entry by Windows 8 tablets could make a dent but don’t count on it.

8. Who will make the biggest mobile acquisition in 2012?

2011 had its fair share of block-buster acquisitions, some successful while others were not. Our panel expects Microsoft and Google to continue making the biggest acquisitions.

9. How will the "Apps vs. Mobile Web" debate shape up in 2012?

It seems like the pendulum is swinging towards the mobile web though hybrid solutions are likely to stay with us for a long time.

10. Who will define the mobile payment/commerce space?

The financial companies safely locked in the mobile payments space and while the value chain is fairly complicated and definition confusion abounds, the likes of Visa, Operators and Google will continue to drive the payments/commerce space.

11. Which solutions will gain the most traction for managing mobile data broadband consumption?

Managing data growth and margins drives all strategies at mobile operators these days which in turns drives the value chain. 4G, tiered pricing, and mobile offload continue to be the top solutions if one has the spectrum that is.

12. Which category will generate the most mobile data revenue in 2012?

Messaging, access, apps, and advertising are the four broad categories that drive mobile data revenues around the world. The developing markets rely on messaging while the developed markets are increasingly looking to access as their dominant form of revenue generation.

13. What will help mobile cloud computing gain traction in 2012?

Mobile cloud computing will continue to be defined by enterprise, storage, and media needs.

14. Which enterprise segment will mobile impact the most?

Best buy is becoming the next Circuit City. Other retailers will follow unless they can successful reinvent themselves. Health is more regulatory driven so the progress will be slow though it is ripe for a complete overhaul and developing nations are moving much faster in this space.

15. What will be the dominant revenue model for apps in 2012?

In-app revenue model made good strides in 2011 but the combination of the various available revenue models will be the norm for most application developers.

16. What mode of mobile payments will get traction in North America and Western Europe in 2012?

2011 was the year to set the ground work for growth in the mobile payments space. Given the investment and focus, we are likely to see more movement and consumer involvement in 2012 with proximity based solutions and commerce of physical goods on mobile.

17. What will be the most successful non-mobile-phone category in 2012?

Tablets dominate. Period.

18. Which of the following are likely to happen in the near future?

The is a significant shift in computing taking place right in front of our eyes wherein tablets are replacing laptops and even desktops in the enterprise. European operators have been experiencing tough times while some of the Asian operators are flush with cash, they might make their move in 2012 though regulatory hurdles might prove to be an issue. 33% of the nations will have elections in 2012, maybe which will move mobile voting to the forefront in some nations. Our panel thought there is a better chance of humans discovering water on another planet than rise of another significant mobile OS.

19. Which areas will feel the most impact from Regulators in 2012?

Net-neutrality and market competitiveness will keep the regulators busy in 2012.

20. Who was the mobile person of the year?

Clearly, Steve Jobs was an easy choice but who will replace him 2012? Jeff Bezos has an early lead followed by Andy Rubin and Mark Zuckerberg. Angry Birds representing the developer community will be in for another terrific year. Other honorable mentions were Tim Cook, Paul Jacobs, Sanjiv Ahuja, Dan Hesse, and Glenn Lurie.

A lot to look forward to in the New Year. My thanks to all who participated and we hope you found it useful as you embark on your journey for a successful 2012.

We will be keeping a close eye on the trends in the wireless data sector in our blog, twitter feeds,future research reports, and articles. The next US Wireless Data Market update will be released in Feb 2012. The next Global Wireless Data Market update will be issued in Apr 2012.

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this survey are our clients.

If Confucius was alive, he would have said, “We live in interesting times.” 2011 is proving to be the blockbuster deal year. After Microsoft/Nokia, AT&T/T-Mobile, Microsoft/Skype, Google made the $4*π billion play for Motorola and raised the stakes in the mobile ecosystem warfare. The ecosystem has entered into a phase that Sun Tzu and Chanakya would have loved to operate in.

In other news, the US wireless data market grew 5% Q/Q and 22% Y/Y to reach $16.2B in mobile data service revenues in Q2 2011 and is on course to increase Y/Y by 22% to $67B in 2011.

US unseated Philippines as the king of TXT messaging with almost 664 messages/sub/month. Philippines is seeing a sharp decline in per user messaging thanks to Facebook and app messaging.

Apple overtook Nokia as the dominant smartphone OEM though Samsung is right behind and is likely to overtake Apple later this year. However, Apple will continue to dominate profit share for the foreseeable future.

Smartphones continued to be sold at a brisk pace accounting for 55% of the devices sold in Q2 2011. Operators are averaging 70% of their postpaid sales as smartphones with Android dominating though iPhone leads in mindshare. The featurephone as a device species is on the verge of extinction. By Christmas, 90% of the US postpaid device sales could be smartphones.

Platform Moves

I am a Platform, therefore I am. Everything and everyone wants to be a platform that developers can build upon. The big 4 – Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are having good success with frequent upgrades and rollouts. Consumers gravitate towards ecOSystems and the richness of the product offerings not specific OSes. OS is just a means to an end. However, the more developers you get excited about the platform, the more the ecosystem thrives and it becomes a virtuous circle. Companies left without the dancing partners need to ensure that they are not the one left standing when the music stops.

While a lot of attention has been focused on Apple and Google skirmishes, Amazon has been quietly tinkering with some interesting products – advertising enabled Kindle, the upcoming tablets and handsets, Android based appstores, mobile payments, distribution giant, cloud, and so on and so forth. Facebook with its nearly 800M friends can unleash several “billion dollar” features that can shake up different mobile microcosms.

In the meantime, Microsoft is trying to find a way to get back into the mobile market. Microsoft’s Xbox franchise gives it something unique and compelling. Their success might depend on how well they are able to integrate and tell a compelling story to the consumers. The upcoming Christmas quarter will be a critical test. RIM and HP don’t have much of an ecosystem to matter in the larger scheme of things. They can be successful in their own ways but attaining a leadership position remains significantly challenging.

AT&T/T-Mobile merger

AT&T’s proposed merger of T-Mobile continued to keep the regulators busy for the quarter. Earlier this year, we published a first of its kind in-depth study on competition in mobile markets -“Competition and the Evolution of Mobile Markets - A Study of Competition in Global Mobile Markets”.The paper presents analysis and an in-depth analytical framework to study the competitive landscape in the global mobile markets. Our research shows that an effective equilibrium point for the top three market share in a given country to be around 46%:29%:18% respectively. We expect that once all is said and done, we will end up in the vicinity of this equation.

Patent Warfare

On the eve of Android launch, I mentioned to one of the journalist to watch for some IP fireworks in about 3 years. For those of us who have been deeply involved in the mobile IP space, the IP events of 2011 have been largely predictable though the valuations have gone through the roof.

Over the last 15 years, I have seen patents and IP in the mobile space from all angles from authoring patents to testifying in ITC cases and pretty much everything in between. In the last six months, patents have become an essential tool for competitive strategy in the mobile device space. See our analysis on the major players with the number of granted patents in Europe and US (slide 13).

To paraphrase the oracle of Omaha, “Only when the litigation tide comes in do you discover who’s been swimming without protection.”

Mobile is changing the way we spend

It is very clear that mobile will be at the center of human evolution for years to come. Mobile collapses time and distance and as such impacts every facet of our lives. While we have come to know the mobile phone as a communications device, their role in our daily lives has been expanding. From checking emails, paying for tickets, sending money transfers, taking pictures of your kids, watching soccer World Cup live, checking commodity pricing, to emergency response to mHealth (mobile Health), mobile devices have become an essential tool to help us navigate our day.

Mobile also plays a key role in how we go about the most basic transaction in a given day that keeps the economy humming – spend. We discussed this and more in the paper “How Mobile Will Change The Way We Spend” that was released earlier this month.

What to expect in the coming months?

All this has setup an absolutely fascinating rest of the year in the communication/computing industry. Convergence is everywhere and is leading to a fundamental reset of the value chains and ecosystems. We are likely to see a few more blockbuster marriage proposals before the year is out.

We are going to be discussing the ins and outs of how the industry is going to evolve in the next decade in our Sept 12th mobile thought leadership summit – Mobile Future Forward which is bringing exceptional industry thought-leaders, inventors, and doers to brainstorm, discuss, and debate what’s next.

Hope you can join us.

As usual, we will be keeping a very close eye on the micro- and macro-trends and reporting on the market on a regular basis in various private and public settings.

Against this backdrop, the analysis of the Q2 2011 US wireless data market is:

Service Revenues

The US Wireless data service revenues grew 5% Q/Q and 22% Y/Y to $16.2B in Q2 2011. The mobile data services revenues for the US market are on track to reach $67B in 2011.

Verizon and AT&T had a good mobile data quarter accounting for 77% of the increase in data revenues in Q2 2011.

For the quarter, AT&T and Verizon accounted for 69% of the market data services revenues and 62% of the subscription base.

Verizon maintained its #1 ranking just edging past NTT DoCoMo who came in at number two with $5.77B in data revenues for the quarter. AT&T maintained its #3 position with $5.4B in data revenues. Sprint and T-Mobile maintained their #6 and #8 rank in the top 10 mobile data operators list for Q2 2011. The proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile will make AT&T #1 by a distance and place 20% of the global mobile data revenues in the hands of the top two US operators. AT&T and Verizon will become the #1 and #2 players respectively.

ARPU

The Overall ARPU increased by $0.41. Average voice ARPU declined by $0.48 while the average data ARPU grew by $0.89 or 5% Q/Q.

The average industry percentage contribution of data to overall ARPU was 36.3% in Q2 2011 and is likely to touch 40% by year’s end. Verizon is likely to be the first to eclipse the 40% mark with AT&T a close second. (NTT DoCoMo became the second major operator to go past the 50% mark this quarter (if we don’t include Philippines) and Japan as a market follows Philippines in going past the 50% mark).

Verizon and Sprint were neck-and-neck in data ARPU followed by AT&T. In terms of % contribution, all the top three operators exceeded the 35% mark. T-Mobile ended the quarter with almost 30% of its revenue coming from the data services.

We expect data revenues to exceed voice revenues in the US market in early 2013.

Subscribers

Helped by the growth in connected devices, the overall net-adds increased by 4.4M with Verizon accounting for almost 50% of the growth.

For the seventh straight quarter, AT&T reported more net-adds from connected devices than postpaid subs. AT&T now accounts for 43% of connected devices in the US (w/ cellular subscription of some sort).

Overall, AT&T has 43% of the connected device share of the market. The connected device segment growth slowed down to 3% Q/Q but is still up 37% Y/Y.

Sprint continued on its comeback trail by adding more than a million subscriptions for the third straight quarter, first time it has done it since Q2 2005.

T-Mobile however continues to be sandwiched between the top three and the next three and hasn’t been able to add postpaid subs for five straight quarters. The net-adds declined for third straight quarter.

Applications and Services

US unseated Philippines as the king of TXT messaging with almost 664 messages/sub/month compared to Philippines which is seeing a sharp decline in per user messaging due to IP messaging. Some of the European operators are also experiencing the pain of declining SMS usage.

While the percentage share of the data revenues is declining for messaging, the revenue growth stays strong with almost $5B in revenues.

The market is finally starting to see activity in the mobile commerce and payment services as well as in various industry verticals like healthcare, retail, and education.

Q2 2011 also saw tremendous activity in the mobile commerce and payments space with lot of announcements from the operators, Internet players, and startups as well as the retailers and the ecommerce players. All are vying for a piece of the mobile wallet. Much more to come in the next 12 months.

Handsets

Smartphones continued to be sold at a brisk pace accounting for 55% of the devices sold in Q2 2011. Operators are averaging 70% of their postpaid sales as smartphones with Android dominating though iPhone leads in mindshare.

For a first time in recent memory, Nokia sold less than 100M devices in a quarter and its marketshare shrank to 22% from a once dominant position of almost 40%.

Apple unseated Nokia as the king of the smartphone hill but Samsung is right behind and is likely to overtake Apple later this year.

35% of all smartphones being sold globally are being sold in the US.

Last quarter, smartphones sales exceeded the 50% mark. The % share jumped to 55% in Q2 2011. Smartphones now account for 80% revenue of all phones sold in the US.

In the vertical vs. horizontal platform battle, the ecosystem is shifting towards horizontal domination in the near-term (units sold) while a majority of the profits reside in the vertical column.

85% of the tablets use WiFi only (some have inactivated cellular chipset) meaning the operator channel is not a necessary distribution channel. Operators who start to bundle multiple devices by single data plans and data buckets are going to see a better yield in this category.

While the definition of 4G stays muddled, Sprint added 1.7M WiMax subs and Verizon incremented their LTE count by 1.2M.

Mobile Data Growth

The mobile data consumption continues unabated. We expect per MB usage in the US to reach 675 MB by the end of 2011 just behind Sweden which is likely to end up at 760 MB.

While the spectrum debate rages on, in addition to the network and backhaul upgrades, policy management and data offload have emerged as top two solutions that operators deploying around the world. Signaling management solutions like Diameter routing are also getting good traction. However, a long-term video solution is still elusive. As we have been saying in our Yottabyte series of research papers, a comprehensive solution strategy is needed to effectively manage margins/bit.

We will have the 3rd edition of our “Managing Growth and Profits in the Yottabyte Era”research out later this year. We will also be discussing this subject in great detail at our Mobile Future Forward summit with some of the most influential voices in the space.

Global Update

Race to a billion - India went past 850M in Q2 2011 subs and China went past 900M. By mid 2012 both India and China will have more than a billion subscriptions.

China Mobile crossed the 600M subscription mark however its 3G introduction has had a tepid response thus and its 4G strategy remains in flux.

We will be keeping a close eye on the trends in the wireless data sector in our blog, twitter feeds,future research reports, and articles. The next US Wireless Data Market update will be released in Nov 2011. The next Global Wireless Data Market update will be issued in Apr 2012.

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this paper are our clients.

The global mobile industry is the most vibrant and fastest growing industry. We expect the total revenue in the industry to touch approximately $1.3 Trillion in 2011 with mobile data representing 24% of the mix. Global Mobile Data revenues are expected to eclipse $300 Billion for the first time in 2011. It is also the first year in which non-messaging data revenues will make up the majority of the overall global data revenues at 53%.

We expect the total number of subscriptions to exceed 6 billion by the end of 2011. The first 1 billion took over 20 years and this last one is going to take only 15 months. The primary growth drivers are India and China which are cumulatively adding 75M new subs every quarter. Indian and China are also entangled in the race to the billion. At the end of Q2 2011, China was ahead by 50M but India is adding subscriptions at faster rate and is likely to eclipse China before Q2 2012. By then, both nations are expected to exceed 1 Billion in total subscriptions making up 31% of the global subscriptions.

In Q1 2011, US became the first major market to exceed the 50% mark in smartphone sales. The global figure stands at approximately 26%. Some operators expect 90% of their devices sales to be smartphones by the end of the year. In terms of the actual smartphone penetration, we expect the US market to eclipse the 50% mark in 2012.

China leads in the number of subs but US dominates in both total and data revenue. A number of emerging nations are now in top 10 – Brazil, India, Russia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Mexico while once dominant – Korea, UK, Italy, Germany have dropped off or slipped in rankings.

The number of mobile operators with more than $1B in data revenues will increase to 47 in 2011. This number was only at 13 in 2005.

Japan continues to be the leader in mobile data with NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, and Softbank Japan ahead of the pack in terms of mobile data revenue and data as a % of total ARPU. In 2011, it became the first major market to have more than 50% of its mobile revenue from data services. Next, Australia and the US have made good inroads in the last two years. In fact, if we look at the overall data revenue, US is much further ahead than any nation due to the size of the market.

While India has the highest subscriber growth rate in the world right now, the revenue generating opportunity remain down right anemic compared to other major markets with average dropping down to $3.50 in overall ARPU. Even with significant subscriber base, there is going to be a general lack of opportunity in the market for the next couple of years relative to other markets.

–Majority of the device sales in the US are now smartphones. Device Replacement is shrinking

5.Mobile Broadband (4G) is being deployed at a faster rate than previous generations

–Over 1 Billion broadband connections by 2011

6.Global Mobile Apps revenue has shifted to off-deck

–The decline is directly proportional to the increase in smartphone penetration by region

7.All major markets are consolidating with the top 3 players at 85% of the market

–Regulators will have to be more prudent and proactive about managing competitiveness and growth

8.Mobile Data Traffic will be 95% of the global mobile traffic by 2015

–Many countries are facing spectrum exhaust in the next 5 years

9.Connected device segment is growing at the fastest pace

–Operators will have to quickly adapt their strategies to stay relevant in this segment

10.Several multi-billion dollar opportunity segments are emerging

–Mobile Advertising, Mobile Commerce, Mobile Wellness, Mobile Games, and Mobile Cloud Computing to name a few

11.Mobile Ecosystem has become very dynamic and unpredictable

–Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook have become the most important revenue generating mobile platforms

12. There will be more changes in the next 10 years than in the previous 100

– The value chains will keep disrupting every 12-24 months by the new players and business models

13. Intellectual Property has become a key component of long-term product strategy

– Top 20 control 1/3rd of the overall mobile patent pool

Devices

Apple has had the tablet space to itself. Thus far the response from the competitors has been tepid esp. on the pricing dimension. Apple has had such a mastery over the supply-chain and months ahead of the competition that by the time they figure out details, Apple already locks up the pricing advantage for the cycle. OEMs try to catch-up on the features but can’t do on the margins. OEMs can grow the pie by bringing products at a better price points that helps attract different demographics to the mix. Microsoft can make good inroads into the space with its Win8 tablet release in 2012 but it will be again in a catch-up mode as the iOS ecosystem will be even more robust by then. The cheaper Android tablets will do well in the market. As expected, tablets will pretty much eliminate the need for netbooks and are starting to eat into the desktop/laptop revenue.

Nokia and RIM are under severe market scrutiny as investors and developers leave in droves. Lack of product planning and execution has left their market share in disarray. Nokia’s valuation has been cut into half while the newcomer HTC edged past the industry giant in a remarkable story of the year. Nokia’s release of N9 shows the engineering and creative design depth but a lot is riding on the first generation of Nokia Windows Phones. While the market hasn’t shown much appetite for Windows phone thus far, a good family of devices might be able to slow the loss trajectory and position the combined team for the up-for-grabs 3rd spot in the ecosystem. HP’s acquisition of Palm is finally bringing some new products to the market but the lack of an effective ecosystem means lack of traction in 2011. Given that the computing is shifting to mobile devices, we can expect some of the weaker desktop/laptop players will exit the industry.

Tablets are primarily being used in the WiFi mode because the primary use case is indoors and WiFi gives a better (and cheaper) user experience. Once operators start to roll out user-friendly family data plans across multiple devices, we can expect the cellular activation go higher but will still be dominated by WiFi overall.

The number of connected devices per subscriber and per family will continue to increase over the course of this decade. As the cost structure and margin profile for these devices will be different, we are likely to measure performance of various operators using margin analysis for e.g. while the ARPU for connected devices is 5-10 times lower than the postpaid subscribers, the margins are typically higher due to lower costs of sales, marketing, support, and subsidy. As such the overall impact is dilutive ARPU but higher margins. So, instead of focusing on just the ARPU, the efficiency of operators will be measured in how well they maintain average margin per user (AMPU) and average margin per connection (AMPC).

Managing the data growth

As a result of the data tsunami, there are two types of opportunities that are being created, one that take advantage of the data being generated in a way that enhances the user experience and provides value and the other in technologies that help manage the traffic data that will continue to grow exponentially.

To be able to stay ahead of the demand, significant planning needs to go in to deal with the bits and bytes that are already exploding. New technical and business solutions will be needed to manage the growth and profit from the services. Relying on only one solution won’t be an effective strategy to manage rising data demand. A holistic approach to managing data traffic is needed and our analysis shows that the cost structure can be reduced by more than half if a suite of solutions are deployed vs. a single dimensional approach and thus bringing the hockey stick curves of data cost more in line with the revenues and thus preserving the margins.

The decision making process within the operator organizations will need to be streamlined as well. Operators should also consider creating a senior post which focuses on both the cost side and the solution side so they can devise and institute a sustainable long-term policy and keep the margins healthy.

Competitive landscape

The Rule of Three is evident in all major markets. While the percentage market share might vary, on an average, the top 3 control 93% of the market in an given nation. It doesn’t matter if the market is defined by “controlled regulation” like in China, Korea, and Japan or if it is “open market” driven in markets such as the US, UK, and India. Eventually, only top 3 operators control the majority of the market. There are niches that others occupy but they are largely irrelevant to the overall structure and functioning of the mobile market.

Markets such as US and India experienced similar competitive environment in their hyper-growth phase. For the US, this phase was in the nineties-mid-2000s while India has been experiencing the similar environment in the last 3-4 years. In both cases, at the start there are 5-6 players with no more than 25% market share but higher than 10% of the mix but gradually the market forces enable consolidation. Over a period of 18 years, US is settling into a “top 3” operator market. India’s brutal price wars are going to trigger the consolidation in the next 12-24 months and will eventually settle into a structure similar to other markets.

The competitive equilibrium point in the mobile industry seems to when the market shares of the top 3 are 46%:29%:18% respectively with the remaining 7% being allocated to the niche operators. To achieve some semblance of equilibrium in the market the top operator shouldn’t have more than 50% of the market share and the number three player shouldn’t have less than 20%. This helps create enough balance in the market to derive maximum value for the consumer.

Mobile operators will face some hard choices in developing and protecting the role they want to play in a given region and the ecosystem at-large. The strategy they choose will have a direct impact on the expected EBITDA margins, investment required over the long-haul, how investors view them, and on the competitive landscape of the country. Given, the fast pace of globalization, new rules and trends might emerge over the course of this decade that further define “communications” and “computing” as we know it.

Apps and Services

As expected, mobile commerce and payment discussions are dominating the ecosystem. There is clearly a lot of investment and marketing dollars being spent. However, the traditional payments networks are largely intact. The new opportunities are being built on top of the existing payment platforms with convenience (Square) and offers and advertising (Google Wallet, ISIS, Groupon). Beyond payments, mobile is getting ingrained into every vertical and every facet of our lives – from healthcare to education, from energy to entertainment, from communication to socialization. And we are in the early innings of figuring out the business models, ecosystem leaders, user behavior, regulatory needs, and the overall impact on society.

Ecosystem Dynamics

It is very clear that the ecosystem dynamics can change very quickly, one just can’t take the competitive and friendly forces for granted. In the past, the silos and segments were clearly defined with little overlap. However, over the course of last couple of years, players have been migrating and surfing in segments across the board - from Apple to Visa, from P&G to AT&T, from Facebook to Time Warner, from Google to Best Buy, every company wants to capture the mindshare and piece of the consumer’s pocketbook. The fine line between partners and competitors can get obliterated in a quarter. Apple is competing with Cisco, Comcast is going after AT&T’s business, Visa and Verizon want to be the payment channel of choice, Amazon is gunning for Microsoft’s enterprise business. One product launch, one acquisition, can change the game in an instant. And this is only the beginning.

Mobile is fundamentally reshaping how we as consumers spend from housing and healthcare to entertainment and travel, from food and drinks to communication and transportation. Mobile not only influences purchase behavior but also post purchase opinions. When the share button is literally a second away, consumers are willingly sharing more information than ever before. Mobile is thus helping close the nirvana gap for brands and advertisers who seek to connect advertising to actual transactions. The long-term battle is however for owning the context of the users. Having the best knowledge about the user to help drive the transaction is the simply the most valuable currency of commerce.

Mobile Future Forward

We will be discussing the global mobile ecosystem – the challenges and the opportunities at our annual mobile thought-leadership summit – Mobile Future Forward - brought to you in partnership with our terrific partners – Qualcomm, Millennial Media, Real Networks, AT&T Interactive, Synchronoss Technologies, OpenMarket, Ericsson, and Openwave. Hope to see you in Seattle on Sept 12th.

We will be keeping a close eye on the trends in the wireless data sector in our blog, twitter feeds,future research reports, and articles. The next US Wireless Data Market update will be released in Aug 2011. The next Global Wireless Market update will be issued in Jan 2012.

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this paper are our clients.

First things first. From all of us at Chetan Sharma Consulting, we wish you and yours a very happy,

healthy, and prosperous 2011. Thanks to all who participated in our 2011 Mobile Predictions Annual Survey. We have found it is the best way to think about the trends coming our way.

We put some of the questions to our colleagues and industry leaders in the industry. We were able to glean some valuable insights from their choices and comments. This survey is different from some of the others in the sense that it includes industry movers and shakers participation. Executives and insiders (n=225) from leading mobile companies across the value chain and around the world opined to help us see what 2011 might bring.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed. We will be calling on you again next year. We are clearly

living in "interesting times" with never a dull moment in our dynamic industry. It has been a terrific

year for us here at Chetan Sharma Consulting and we are looking forward to 2011 and seeing many of

you along the way. We hope you enjoyed gaining from the collective wisdom.

Be well, Do Cool Work, Stay in touch.

Thanks. With warm wishes,

Your feedback is always welcome.

Thanks.

Chetan Sharma

Now onto the 2011 Mobile Industry Predictions Survey Results

The panel comprised of movers and shakers of the mobile industry from around the world.

What will be the biggest stories of 2011?

In last year’s survey, Google/Android narrowly missed out to be the biggest story of the year but this year, the verdict was clear that Google will continue to dominate the headlines with Android devices and new updates and apps. Given that we are in the midst of 4G deployments and ITU’s flipflop on the definition, we could be in for an interesting year.

When will Verizon iPhone launch?

Inordinate amount of ink has been spilt over Verizon’s iPhone speculation. However, given the chatter, our panel voted for a Q1 launch.

Who will be the most open player in the mobile ecosystem in 2011?

In all our surveys Google has consistently cemented its perception of being the most open in the ecosystem.

Will Android tablet sales exceed iOS tablet sales in 2011?

Last year, Android OS edged past iOS, however, given the lead iOS has had in tablets, it might be hard to overcome the number of shipments in 2011.

Who will make the biggest mobile acquisition in 2011?

Got Cash? Big players are likely to go shopping but who will score the blockbuster deal of the year. Google and Microsoft will duke it out with Google taking the spoils.

How will the "Apps vs. Mobile Web" debate shape up in 2011?

Apps vs Mobile Web has been as hotly debated in the industry as the CDMA vs. GSM battles of the past. Our panel thought Apps will continue to grow though mobile web starts to show its muscle.

By how much will the mobile advertising ad-spend increase in 2011?

Our panel was more bullish on mobile advertising than last year with a good 50% of respondents aiming for 200% growth and higher.

Which market will be the biggest infrastructure in 2011 for sales opportunities?

India and China are laying out 3G and North America is expanding on 4G. Infrastructure contracts abound.

Who will be the mobile come back story of 2011?

Many long-time players are under the gun this year. Will Windows 7 help Microsoft or will Meego make Nokia competitive. Story will unfold this year.

Who will end up having the strongest position in the mobile payment/commerce space?

While Japan/Korea markets have developed mature mobile payments solutions, the battle royale of mobile payments in North America will play out between the financial guys and Operators with Internet players making a strong run at it as well. 2011 might help decide the long-term winners in the space. Our panel thinks, the likes of Mastercard and Visa will edge out others in the tussle.

Which areas will feel the most impact from Regulators in 2011?

Regulators can have a huge impact on the course of the industry and nation’s competitiveness. With the laws all but laid out, the real rulings might come from the courts.

Which solutions will gain the most traction for managing mobile data broadband consumption?

2010 saw the emergence of tiered data pricing in North America and operators all over the world are bracing for a long-term challenge of managing mobile data growth. We have written extensively on this subject in our Yottabyte series. Our panel voted for Tiered pricing and 4G as the top two solutions.

Which category will generate the most data revenues in 2011?

Global markets are quite different and while data service revenues have been growing in all regions, our panel breaks down by categories in terms of expected contribution from various segments.

What will help mobile cloud computing gain traction in 2011?

Mobile Cloud Computing is expected to take several strides in 2011 with Media and Enterprise demand at the forefront.

What will be the most successful non-mobile phone category in 2011?

As we have highlighted in our previous research, Connected devices have shown tremendous growth in 2010. Tablet seems to be clear category winner.

What will be the breakthrough category in mobile in 2011?

Mobile payments and commerce are starting to take off and are expected to show the most growth in 2011.

Mobile as a platform is booming with Retail finally getting into the swing of things and will show the most activity in 2011.

What will be the dominant revenue model for apps in 2011?

While paid apps dominated the revenue stream in the early days, advertising and in-app payments are taking off on iOS and Android. Developers will play with a combination of models depending on what works on a given platform.

What mode of mobile payments will get traction in NA and WE in 2011?

Operators experimented with mobile payments over the last few years, now is the time to put the solutions to the test.

Who was the mobile person of the year?

Who can compete with King Jobs. Launching iconic devices year after another, Steve Jobs has set the direction of the industry since 2007 and was a clear favorite for the mobile person of the year. The tremendous success of the apps personified by blockbuster hit of "Angry Birds" took away the second spot with Andy Rubin’s Android effort won him the third spot.

Well, there you have it. The top trends and stories we will be talking about in 2011. Thanks again for all who participated and we hope that you found this useful as you embark on your journey for the year.

We will be keeping a close eye on the trends in the wireless data sector in our blog, twitter feeds,future research reports, and articles. The next US Wireless Data Market update will be released in Mar 2011. The next Global Wireless Data Market update will be issued in Mar 2011.

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this paper are our clients.

The US wireless data market grew 6% Q/Q and 22% Y/Y to exceed $13.2B in mobile data service revenues in Q2 2010 - on track so far to meet our initial estimate of $54B for the year.

Having narrowly edged NTT DoCoMo last quarter for the first time, Verizon Wireless maintained its number one ranking for the 1H 2010 in terms of the operator with the most mobile data revenues (though the difference was thinner than the amoeba membrane). The total wireless connections for Verizon were almost 100M with 92.1M being the traditional subscriber base. Rest of the 3 top US operators also maintained leading positions amongst the top 10 global mobile data operators.

Sprint had the first positive netadd quarter in 3 years and has been slowly and steadily turning the ship around. T-Mobile did better on the postpaid netadds but overall additions declined again. The larger question for the market is if 4 large players can stay competitive. Generally, the answer is no. But these are different times and there are a number of permutations and combinations that are possible.

The US subscription penetration crossed 95% at the end of Q2 2010. If we take out the demographics of 5 yrs and younger, the mobile penetration is now past 100%. While the traditional net-adds have been slowing, the “connected device” segment is picking up so much that both AT&T and Verizon added more connected devices than postpaid subs in Q2 2010. Given the slow postpaid growth, operators are fiercely competing in prepaid, enterprise, connected devices, and M2M segments.

Data traffic continued to increase across all networks. By 1H 2010, the average US consumer was consuming approximately 230 MB/mo up 50% in 6 months. US has become ground zero for mobile broadband consumption and data traffic management evolution. While it lags Japan and Korea in 3G penetration by a distance, due to higher penetration of smartphones and datacards, the consumption is much higher than its Asian counterparts. Given that it is also becoming the largest deployment base for HSPA+ and LTE, most of the cutting edge research in areas of data management and experimentation with policy, regulations, strategy, and business models is taking place in the networks of the US operators and keenly watched by players across the global ecosystem.

As we had forecasted, the tiered pricing structure for mobile broadband touched the US shores with AT&T becoming the first major operator to change its pricing plan based on consumer consumption. We will see the pricing evolve over the next 2-4 quarters as the US mobile ecosystem adjusts to the new realities and strategies for mobile data consumption.

In the connected device category, iPad like its flashy cousin dominated the headlines, the sales numbers, and the industry profits. The device sent every slate maker back to the drawing board, many projects were cancelled and strategies are still being formulated to capture a new burgeoning space and Apple again has a massive lead of mindshare and pocketbook.

Kids of the now generation are growing with connected electronics that is fundamentally altering the behaviors and expectations of interaction, communication, consumption, and monetization.

All this has setup an absolutely fascinating period in the communication/computing industry. Convergence is everywhere and is leading to fundamental reset of the value chains and ecosystems. We are going to be discussing the ins and outs of how the industry is going to evolve in the next decade in our Sept 8th event – Mobile Future Forward which is bringing exceptional industry thought-leaders, inventors, and doers to brainstorm, discuss, and debate what’s next. Hope you can join the discussion.

What to expect in the coming months?

31% of the US subscription base is now smartphones.

The pace of product introduction is accelerating with each quarter. Devices of all shapes and sizes are coming into the market literally every week. Players are having to re-evaluate their businesses and long-term strategies. Several new impressive devices got introduced during the course of 1H of 2010 including the iPad and EVO.

There are several players whose future is at stake (to put it mildly). The competition has grown fierce and companies are finding it hard to take ideas from R&D to products in market in a short amount of time.

Microsoft announced its comeback with the W7 commercial launch imminent. The change in UI was refreshing and the expectations are quite high. W7 v2 is likely around the corner to update on the flaws of v1. HP acquired Palm in an attempt to become relevant again in the mobile device space. It has been an action packed 1H 2010 and we can expect more of the same for the remainder of the year.

2010 has also been active on the regulatory front as the national broadband plan was unveiled in March and the subsequent debate over the course of nations broadband future kept the spectrum, net-neutrality, and exclusivity issues at the forefront.

To start planning for 4G, 5G, and beyond, US should think about rolling a 50 year broadband plan. While more spectrum is always helpful, will we have all the spectrum we need in 2050? or do we need to invent new technologies and business models that use spectrum more wisely? This topic will keep the industry occupied for some time to come. (We will be going in-depth into this subject at our Sept event with some very senior and experienced executives)

2010 is also the year of network rollouts. T-Mobile has been rolling out HSPA+ at an impressive rate, Clearwire announced its intention to move to LTE, Verizon is betting big on LTE and looking for competitive marketing advantage over the course of the next 12 months. AT&T has been adding backhaul, upgrading to HSPA+ and planning for LTE all at once. Even the smaller carriers like MetroPCS are looking for competitive advantage with quicker LTE launch and beat others by carrying the first LTE smartphone. (We will be releasing the next edition of our “State of the “Mobile” Broadband Nation” paper later this year)

As we had mentioned last year, the mobile data traffic kept on growing disproportional to the revenues. A series of solutions have come into the market from players big and small. We released the second edition of our in-depth research paper on data growth - "Managing Growth and Profits in the Yottabyte Era" last quarter.

We will be keeping a very close eye on the micro- and macro-trends and reporting on the market on a regular basis in various private and public settings.

Against this backdrop, the analysis of the Q2 2010 US wireless data market is:

Service Revenues (Slides 7, 16)

The US Wireless data service revenues grew 6% Q/Q to $13.2B in Q210. Compared to Q209, the mobile data service revenues grew 22%.

Verizon and AT&T accounted for 75% of the increase in data revenues in Q2 2010.

T-Mobile’s 3G drive is starting to pay off. While the net-adds were still in the red, its data growth is starting to match with its peers. The 20% 3G smartphone base definitely helps.

Verizon Wireless again nudged past NTT DoCoMo in overall mobile data revenues by a whisker. By the end of the year, China Mobile and AT&T are also likely to cross their Japanese counterpart in quarterly mobile data service revenues.

AT&T and Verizon now account for 70% of the market data services revenues and 62% of the subscription base.

ARPU (Slides 8-11)

The Overall ARPU increased by $0.46 reversing the declining trend of the past three quarters. Average voice ARPU declined by $0.13 while the average data ARPU grew by $0.58 or 4% Q/Q.

The average industry percentage contribution of data to overall ARPU is now 31% in Q210.

Verizon led in data ARPU with $17.37 followed by AT&T and Sprint. In terms of % contribution, all the top three operators exceeded the 30% mark. T-Mobile ended the quarter with approximately 25% of its revenue coming from data services.

Subscribers (Slides 12-14)

Overall netadds stayed stable at just over 3M with AT&T gaining the lion-share (though their count now includes the connected devices while other operators don’t specifically include that in the calculations).

The texting see-saw between US and Philippines continued in Q210. US averaged around 639 messages/user/mo marginally behind Philippines.

For the third straight quarter, AT&T reported more net-adds from connected devices than postpaid subs. Connected devices are now 7% of AT&T’s subscription base.

Sprint got back into the positive net-adds territory again after 3 years. T-Mobile’s net-adds continued to decline. T-Mobile’s 20% and Sprint’s 23% subscriber base is now prepaid. The national prepaid penetration is touching 20%.

Applications and Services

Non-messaging services continues to grab 60-65% of the data revenues for the US carriers.

There is a significant shift taking place in terms of app revenues. In 2010, there will be more revenues generated (globally) from off-deck than on-deck for the first time and while the on-deck revenues are in billions, the decline trend looks irreversible. In the US, this shift will occur next year. (We released our mobile apps economy research paper earlier this year)

The usage and data consumption trends are enabling carriers to accelerate their 3.5G/4G plans and develop long-term business and technical strategies.

Handsets

Nokia sold 111M units in Q2 2010 amounting for 36% of the market share. Samsung again had a solid quarter with 64M devices sold with the share at 21%. LG Electronics at 10%, Sony Ericsson and RIM at 3.6% rounded up the top 5.

Apple shipped 8.4M iPhones in Q2 but the criticism over the antenna design took some shine out from yet another home run.

Smartphone penetration increased to 31% in the US market

Data Traffic (Slide 15)

· As we noted in our last update, the data traffic is now significantly more than the voice traffic. By 1H 2010, the average US consumer was consuming approximately 230 MB/mo up 50% in 6 months. The good news is that there are several solutions available and are being invented that will help manage the data growth starting with the tiered pricing plans.

To discuss all these trends and more, we are putting together a unique Mobile Future Forward Executive Summit and are fortunate to have the company of some of the sharpest minds in the industry, folks who both have the vision to shape the evolution and the authority to invest billions of dollars this decade to make things happen. Hope to see you in Seattle on Sept 8th.

Each panel discussion will involve luminaries/experts on specific topics, for e.g.

Opportunities in Mobile

Mike Sievert, CCO, Clearwire

Dr. Genevieve Bell, Fellow, Intel

Shi Lirong, President, ZTE

Subba Rao, CEO, Tata DoCoMo

Evolution of Communication/ Engagement

Christopher Dean, Chief Strategy Officer, Skype

Erick Tseng, Head of Mobile, Facebook

Mario Queiroz, VP, Google

David Weiden, General Partner, Khosla Ventures

The size of the panel will be small and the time duration long so we can delve deep into the issues and questions. For more panel, speaker, sponsor, and program details, please visithttp://www.mobilefutureforward.com

Your feedback is always welcome.

Thanks.

Chetan Sharma

We will be keeping a close eye on the trends in the wireless data sector in our blog, twitter feeds,future research reports, and articles. The next US Wireless Data Market update will be released in Nov 2010. The next Global Wireless Data Market update will be issued in Sept 2010.

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this paper are our clients.

MFF is a gathering of some of the most brilliant minds in the mobile industry. The goal is to look at how mobile is likely to evolve over the course of this decade. We couldn’t have done this without the tremendous support of our excellent sponsors who are paving the way in their respective segments.

The US wireless data market grew 5% Q/Q and 22% Y/Y to exceed $12.5B in mobile data service revenues in Q1 2010 - on track so far to our initial estimate of $54B for the year.

In a significant milestone that went largely unnoticed, Verizon Wireless edged past NTT DoCoMo - the decade old leader in mobile data revenues to become the biggest mobile data operator by data revenues. Helped by its 93M subscriber base and high ARPU, the Verizon juggernaut is steamrolling. Rest of the 3 top US operators also occupy leading positions amongst the top 10 global mobile data operators.

The US subscription penetration was approximately 94% at the end of Q1 2010. If we take out the demographics of 5 yrs and younger, the mobile penetration is now past 100%. While the traditional net-adds have been slowing, the “connected device” segment is picking up so much so that both AT&T and Verizon added more connected devices than postpaid subs in Q1 2010. Given the slow postpaid growth in, operators are fiercely competing in prepaid, enterprise, connected devices, and M2M segments.

Data traffic continued to increase across all networks. US has become ground zero for mobile broadband consumption and data traffic management evolution. While it lags Japan and Korea in 3G penetration by a distance, due to higher penetration of smartphones and datacards, the consumption is much higher than its Asian counterparts. Given that it is also becoming the largest deployment base for HSPA+, LTE and WiMAX, most of the cutting edge research in terms of data management and experimentation with policy, regulations, strategy, and business models is taking place in the networks of the US operators and keenly watched by players across the global ecosystem.

We are starting to see the inevitable changes in broadband pricing starting with T-Mobile and MetroPCS. Over the course of this year, we are likely to see newer pricing models that tie usage to pricing and add multiple devices to a single data bucket.

The fabled iPad landed in the market and it is a winner. Apple’s latest gizmo has created a new user experience category of casual and couch computing that will foster growth in the connected device space. Kids of the now generation are growing with connected electronics that is fundamentally altering the behaviors and expectations of interaction, communication, consumption, and monetization.

Privacy brouhaha has been brewing for some time and the polity class is getting interested in stepping in. If people are really serious about tackling privacy, OEMs and carriers should build a physical/soft privacy button on the device with 3-5 levels (just like for the ringer volume) that allows users to open/close privacy across all applications and services with the touch of a button. All apps and services should adhere to the principle via APIs. The other mistake companies make about privacy is by treating everyone the same. Privacy is about the perception of control and transparency. If it is given back to the consumer, they are likely to engage more and have a more positive impact on revenue streams that are likely to flow.

In an another global milestone, Softbank became the first major operator to have more service revenues from data services than voice services. In Q1 2010, 55% of its service revenues were attributed to data services. (While Smart and Globe have been reporting 50%+ revenues from data services for a long time, the total revenues are not at scale with the leading global operators. Incidentally, for the first time in many years, the data revenue % slipped below 50% for the both operators in Q1). Based on current projections, US is likely to cross the 50% data revenue threshold in late 2012 or early 2013. NTT DoCoMo is next in line to cross the 50% mark this year.

All this has setup an absolutely fascinating period in the communication/computing industry. Convergence is everywhere and is leading to fundamental reset of the value chains and ecosystems. We are going to be discussing the ins and outs of how the industry is going to evolve in the next decade in our Sept 8th event – Mobile Future Forward which is bringing leading industry thought-leaders, inventors, and doers to brainstorm, discuss, and debate what’s next. Hope you can join the discussion.

What to expect in the coming months?

The pace of product introduction is accelerating with each quarter. Devices of all shapes and sizes are coming into the market. Players are having to re-evaluate their businesses and long-term strategies. Several new impressive handsets got introduced during the course of 1H of 2010. iPad finally launched and even the next generation iPhone walked into a bar.

Microsoft announced its comeback with the W7 launch though the time it is taking to launch is making partners nervous. The change in UI was refreshing though the inability for the OEMs to differentiate is not winning friends. HP acquired Palm in attempt to become relevant again in the mobile device space. Some other players missed out in buying an attractive IP portfolio. It has been an action packed 2010 thus far and we can expect more of the same for the remainder of the year.

2010 has also been active on the regulatory front as the national broadband plan was unveiled in March (our thoughts on the plan). The Comcast ruling delivered a blow to the FCC and any directives or policies will hardly have any impact on the ecosystem in the short-term.

With the looming spectrum shortage, regulatory bodies can have a significant impact on the competitiveness of a nation. Many countries in South America have imposed unnecessary spectrum caps. Others are behind in sorting out their spectrum allocations. The industry and regulators need to work hand-in-hand to make progress beyond speeches and paperwork.

To start planning for 4G, 5G, and beyond, US should think about rolling a 50 year broadband plan. While more spectrum is always helpful, will we have all the spectrum we need in 2050? or do we need to invent new technologies and business models that use spectrum more wisely? This topic will keep the industry occupied for some time to come. (Former FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin headlined our Mobile Breakfast Series event in March and discussed the Spectrum Crises. Our June 10th event is bringing CEOs of some of the most innovative mobile startups to discuss the ecosystem)

2010 is also the year of network rollouts. T-Mobile has been rolling out HSPA+ at an impressive rate, Clearwire has been expanding the network so fast that it has become the biggest construction company in the US, Verizon is betting big on LTE and AT&T has been adding backhaul, upgrading to HSPA+ and planning for LTE all at once. Even the smaller carriers like MetroPCS are looking for competitive advantage with quicker LTE launch and beat others by carrying the first LTE smartphone. (We will be releasing the next edition of our “State of the “Mobile” Broadband Nation” paper later this year)

As we had mentioned last year, the mobile data traffic kept on growing disproportional to the revenues. A series of solutions have come into the market from players big and small. We will be releasing the second edition of our in-depth research paper on data growth - "Managing Growth and Profits in the Yottabyte Era" later this month.

We will be keeping a very close eye on the micro- and macro-trends and reporting on the market on a regular basis in various private and public settings.

Against this backdrop, the analysis of the Q1 2010 US wireless data market is:

Service Revenues (Slides 7, 16)

The US Wireless data service revenues grew 5% Q/Q to $12.5B in Q110. Compared to Q109, the mobile data service revenues grew 22%.

Verizon and AT&T accounted for 60% of the increase in data revenues in Q4 2009.

T-Mobile’s 3G drive is starting to pay off. While the net-adds were still in the red, it experienced the highest % growth amongst its peers in mobile data service revenues for the quarter.

In a significant milestone, Verizon Wireless edged past NTT DoCoMo, the mobile data revenue leader since the late nineties. By the end of the year, China Mobile and AT&T are also likely to cross their Japanese counterpart in quarterly mobile data service revenues.

AT&T and Verizon now account for 69% of the market data services revenues and 62% of the subscription base.

ARPU (Slides 8-11)

Overall ARPU decreased by $0.17. Average voice ARPU declined by $0.84 while the average data ARPU grew by $0.67 or 4.6% Q/Q.

As expected, the average industry percentage contribution of data to overall ARPU crossed the 30% mark in Q110 and is likely to get past 35% by end of the year.

Verizon led in (blended) data ARPU with $17.06 followed by AT&T and Sprint. In terms of % contribution, all the top three operators exceeded the 30% mark. T-Mobile ended the quarter with 23.70% of its revenue coming from data services.

Subscribers (Slides 12-14)

In Q409, the net-adds had increased from past several quarters, however, in Q110, the net-adds declined again.

The texting see-saw between US and Philippines continued in Q110. US average was around 615 messages/user/mo just behind Philippines.

In a sign of the times, for the first time, AT&T and Verizon reported more net-adds from connected devices than postpaid subs.

T-Mobile and Sprint improved their net-add declines from last quarter though it was primarily from the prepaid segment. T-Mobile’s 21% and Sprint’s 23% subscriber base is now prepaid. The national prepaid penetration is touching 20%.

Applications and Services

Non-messaging services continues to grab 60-65% of the data revenues for the US carriers.

There is a significant shift taking place in terms of app revenues. In 2010, there will be more revenues generated (globally) from off-deck than on-deck for the first time and while the on-deck revenues are in billions, the decline trend looks irreversible. In the US, this shift will occur next year. (We released our mobile apps economy research paper last quarter)

The usage and data consumption trends are enabling carriers to accelerate their 3.5G/4G plans and develop long-term business and technical strategies.

The news reports of resuscitation of the media industry by iPad were premature.

Handsets

Nokia sold 108M units in Q1 2010 including 21.5M smartphones. Samsung again had a solid quarter with over 64M devices sold increasing its market share to 22%. LG Electronics at 9%, Sony Ericsson at 3.6% rounded up the top 4. For the first time, Motorola didn’t figure in the top 5 device makers. Android, Apple, and RIM made gains as well.

The constant drumbeat of new devices continued with Droid, Nexus One, HD2, EVO, and iPad.

Open

The battle for “Open” is breaking out in the street with latest episode being Apple vs. Adobe. We tend to forget that open is a means to an end, not an end in of itself. We are experiencing a fascinating period of transition in the mobile industry and some of the biggest brands in computing and communications are right in the middle of it.

Data Traffic (Slide 15)

· As we noted in our last update, the data traffic is now significantly more than the voice traffic. The good news is that there are several solutions that available and are being invented that will help manage the data growth. The question is how fast will the operators deploy some of these solutions.

We will be keeping a close eye on the trends in the wireless data sector in our blog, twitter feeds,future research reports, and articles. The next US Wireless Data Market update will be released in Aug 2010. The next Global Wireless Data Market update will be issued in Sept 2010.

Your feedback is always welcome.

Should you have any questions about navigating or understanding the economic and competitive icebergs, please feel free to drop us a line.

Thanks.

Chetan Sharma

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this note are our clients.

The Global Wireless Markets continued to grow rapidly especially in India and China where the carriers (combined) are adding almost 30M new subscriptions every month. Amongst the two, India is outpacing China 2:1. China touched 750M subscriptions while India crossed 525M by the end of 2009. With 4.6B subscriptions, the global subscriptions penetration was above 68%.

The global mobile data revenues reached $220B and mobile data now contributes 26% of the overall global mobile service revenues.

As expected, the overall global mobile revenues stayed pretty flat for the year at around $1.1 trillion as many regions were hit by the recession and the competition pushed the ARPU lower for many operators. While the countries like US, Japan, China, and India showed very little signs of pullback, most of Europe and the developing world experienced a decline in overall service revenues in 2009. All the major markets have their data contribution percentages above 10% now.

For some of the leading operators, data is now contributing almost 50% of the overall revenues. However, the increase in data ARPU is not completely offsetting the drop in voice ARPU for most operators. NTT DoCoMo continues to dominate the carrier ranking in terms of the mobile data service revenues, Verizon Wireless which became #2 replacing China Mobile and is slowly edging towards the #1 spot and is likely to overtake DoCoMo within the next few quarters.

Though 4G as a standard hasn’t been defined yet, the discussions around LTE and WiMAX deployments grew intense. Telia Sonera became the first operator to commercially launch LTE. At CTIA, Sprint/HTC became the first players to launch a WiMAX smartphone and MetroPCS/Samsung took the honors for the LTE smartphone.

2009 also marked the year when the global data traffic (monthly) exceeded the global voice traffic. In the US, the yearly mobile data traffic exceeded the voice traffic for the first time.

We are also entering the phase of global mega-mergers in telecom. Bharti Airtel of India just acquired Kuwait-based Zain Group to become the 5th largest telecom group in the world (at the end of 2009, it was #9). There are now 14 telecom groups with 100M or more subscriptions. While China Mobile’s ARPU is 1/5th of its western counterparts, it operates its business at higher margin, around 51%. There are a number of global players mainly in Europe and Asia who have mastered the art of running lean operations and if they have good bank balance they are going to go shopping in the days ahead.

From the revenue perspective, the $50 billion revenue club is more exclusive with China Mobile, Vodafone, AT&T Mobility, and Verizon Wireless as its sole members.

As we sit at the cusp of the iPad era, there is a bigger transformation taking place and that is of the connected consumer electronic devices (CEDs). Few years from now, most popular CEDs will have connectivity. We are also approaching the start of phase where pricing of access will start to morph - we will see the introduction of family data plans (something we have been advocating for some time), ability to connect multiple devices to the same GB plan, more granular use plans (per session/day/week/mo/yr etc, roll-over GBs anyone?). As the number of connected devices/consumer increases, we will start worrying about Average Margin Per User (AMPU) or Average Margin Per Connection (AMPC) because ARPU won’t quite capture the dynamics of the industry.

Exciting times indeed.

Chetan Sharma Consulting conducted its semiannual study on the global mobile data industry. We studied wireless data trends in over 40 major countries - from developed and mature markets such as Japan, Korea, UK, and Italy to hyper growth markets such as China and India.

This note summarizes the findings from the research with added insights from our work in various global markets.

Impact of Global Recession

Telecom in general fared better than other industries. In some regions, it hardly caused a tremor. However, in most nations, the impact was felt by the operators. Amongst the 40 major operators we studied, SK Telecom, 3 Australia, KTF, T-Mobile Netherlands, Rogers, Softbank Japan, Singtel, Vodafone Italy, T-Mobile Germany, 3 Sweden, Telstra, China Unicom, and Vodafone Germany experienced increase in both the data ARPU and the overall ARPU during 2009. Some of increase was due to the fluctuation in international currencies e.g. Korea.

Looking at the data at a country level, most nations noted a decline in overall ARPU. Only Venezuela, Pakistan, Argentina, Bangladesh, Australia, and Poland showed positive increase in ARPU since 2008.

Rule of Three is kicking in most markets with smaller players having to consider the M&A option to remain viable. T-Mobile/Orange, Bharti/Zain tie-ups are just the start of that process. We are likely to see many international mergers in 2010 and beyond as power in the mobile ecosystem self-adjusts.

US extended its lead over Japan as the most valuable mobile data market in service revenue with US adding $44.56B vs. $32.5B for Japan in 2009. China with $20.3B was ranked number 3. US registered the highest growth amongst the top 3 with over 40% increase from EOY 2008 levels followed by Japan and China.

NTT DoCoMo continues to dominate the wireless data revenues rankings with over $16B in data services revenue in 2009. Almost 46% of its overall revenue now comes from data services. DoCoMo also crossed the 95% 3G mark.

Each of the top 5 carriers exceeded $10B in yearly mobile data service revenues in 2009

Data revenues for the top 10 operators now account for almost 43% of the global mobile data revenues.

The biggest jump in data revenues was experienced by Verizon, Softbank, and AT&T. DoCoMo saw an 11% increase for the year.

Most of the operators in the developed nations are contemplating future strategies to boost data revenues such that the decline in voice revenues is at least compensated for. There are very few operators who have experienced increase in overall ARPU.

China reported approximately $20.3B in data revenues for 2009 and the percentage contribution from data services is around 32%, data ARPU is around $3.2. For India, data ARPU continues to stay below $0.50 as most of the new adds are voice only subscribers and there is continued price pressure in the market.

China Mobile remains the most valuable telecom operator with over $195B in market cap. It is followed by Vodafone at around $122B. Telecom groups in mature markets are under enormous pressure to either come up with a global expansion strategy or accelerate their existing plans.

In 2009, SMS’s vice like grip on data revenues continues to loosen a bit with many carriers seeing an increase in non-SMS data revenues. On an average, Japan and Korea have over 70-75% of their revenue coming from non-SMS data applications, US around 50-60%, and Western Europe around 20-40%.

NTT DoCoMo has been at the cutting edge of the mobile data evolution by creating new markets. They are exploring new technologies and social experiments ahead of almost anybody else in the market. Our long history with the Japanese and Korean markets has taught us that while the individual strategies in each market will differ, one should study the trends, technologies, and ecosystem dynamics in these markets to get a sense of what’s coming.

· From the revenue perspective, the $50 billion revenue club has limited membership with China Mobile, Vodafone, AT&T Mobility, and Verizon Wireless as its sole members.

ARPU

Most of the major operators around the world have double digit percentage contribution to their overall ARPU from data services. Operators like DoCoMo, and Softbank are over 46%. KDDI, 3 Australia, 3 Italy, 3 UK, Vodafone UK, O2 UK, Telstra, and 3 Sweden exceeded 35% and many others are on the verge of crossing the 30% mark.

NTT DoCoMo reported the highest data ARPU for the year while Rogers took away the honors for the highest overall ARPU. Other notable percentage increases in ARPU were from 3 Italy, SK Telecom, KTF, T-Mobile Germany, 3 Sweden, and T-Mobile Austria. The Japanese operators saw a decline in ARPU by 3%.

The biggest percentage contribution by data ARPU has been consistently registered (since mid 2002) by two Philippines carriers – Smart Communications and Globe Telecom with over 53% (or $2) contribution coming from the data services.

Softbank of Japan looks set to be the first major operator (outside of Philippines) with more revenues coming from data services than voice.

Mobile Data Traffic

We have been calling attention to the tremendous increase in mobile data traffic for some time. The discussion has hit mainstream and many operators are scrambling to nail-down their short-term and long-term strategies to manage the data traffic growth in their networks. See our paper on the subject "Managing growth and profits in the Yottabyte era." The recommendations discussed in the paper are slowly being adopted by various vendors and operators worldwide.

The global mobile data traffic exceeded an Exabyte for the first time in 2009. In fact, the data usage is growing so fast that this year, the two territories experiencing the most growth - North America and Western Europe are both going to exceed an Exabyte in mobile data traffic.

2009 also marked the year when the global data traffic (monthly) exceeded the global voice traffic.

For many of the superphone heavy operators, devices like iPhone and Android account for more than 50% of their total data traffic.

2010 will mark the first year when the total number of mobile broadband connections will exceed the total number of fixed broadband connections.

For more mobile data traffic analysis, please stay tuned for the second edition of our Yottabyte research

Subscriptions

India continues to be the hottest market on the planet in terms of net-adds with (again) a world record-setting month in Jan 2010 with 19.9 million net adds. To give you a perspective, this is almost 1.5 times the number of subscribers US added in the whole year. It is like adding a Canadian wireless market every month. For the year 2009, India added 177 million subs vs. 106 million for China. Combined, one year of growth in these two market is equivalent to the size of the third largest market - the US, to date. Making money on the net-adds is a different proposition all together (more discussion on the international market in our global market update later this month)

Thanks to the explosive growth in the emerging markets, the global mobile market went past 4.6B in 2009 and is likely to cross the 5B mark in 2010. The global mobile subscriptions now represent over 68% of human population on planet earth.

China crossed the 700M subscription mark in July while India’s total went past 500 in Nov. In the meantime, US crossed the 90% subscriptions mark in 2009.

In the last 10 years, the growth patterns in the mobile industry have completely reversed. In 1998, the developed world accounted for 76% of the subscriber base, in 2008; the percentages have flipped with developing world now accounting for 76% of the subscriber base and are likely to increase to 85% by 2018.

China Mobile became the first operator (and likely to be the only one for a very long time) to cross the 500M mark. It remains the #1 carrier in terms of the total number of subscriptions followed by Vodafone. Telefonica, América Móvil, Telenor, T-Mobile, China Unicom, TeliaSonera, Orange, and Bharti Airtel round up the top 10 largest telecom groups in the world.

Mobile Apps

· The total number of app downloads in 2009 reached 7 billion resulting in approximately $4.1B in revenues 12% of which was from mobile advertising.

· The number of non-carrier appstores jumped to 38 from 8 in the previous year.

· While Asia had the highest percentage of the download share, North America had the highest share of the apps revenue accounting for over 50% of the total revenue.

· The paid ASP in 2009 was approximately $1.9 and the advertising revenue generated from the free applications was approximately $0.09/user/app/year

Messaging still accounts for the lion-share of data service revenues. However, other services such as Mobile Music, Mobile TV and video streaming, Voice navigation, PNDs, Mobile Games, IMS, LBS, Mobile advertising, and others have gradually chipped away the share from messaging. Alternate devices with wholesale cellular agreements are also flooding the market. In Japan, Mobile Commerce is expected to do much better than Mobile Advertising. Though not much talked about, enterprise applications are also being adopted widely esp. in North America as more workers become mobile and corporations seek efficiencies in their operations and supply-chain.

Nokia dominated the year as usual but the revenue share is shrinking and so is the lucrative smartphone share. Apple, RIM, and Google are relentlessly attacking the top tier while Samsung, LG, and others giving a tough fight for the bottom tier. We see a new middle tier emerging that has the form factor of a featurephone and functionality of a smartphone. The smartphone category is getting further split into regular qwerty smartphones like Blackberry and the touch and full browser based superphones like the iPhone and Droid.

The year was dominated by several blockbuster device launches like the iPhone 3GS.

Next few years will be big for infrastructure providers as many countries both developed and developing get into upgrading their infrastructure.

Willcom, the small Japanese carrier that started the flat-rate unlimited phenomenon filed for bankruptcy last month.

In the US, the increase in messaging volume catapulted US as the number one texting nation by messages/user/month going past the long-time leader Philippines.

Deployment of 3.5G technologies is in full swing. However, it is the discussion of 4G that is occupying the headlines, even though 4G hasn’t been fully defined yet and the current candidates for 4G are nowhere near the performance goals of 4G (150Mbps/50+Mbps). Many larger operators have laid out their plans for deploying LTE starting this year.

We are also seeing regulators playing an active role in making the markets competitive and attractive in the long-term.

· The velocity with which the smartphones are being introduced into the market esp. the western markets, one wonders if in five years, we will be using the moniker to describe devices and if the "dumbness" in the device market will be practically eliminated. Led by Apple’s Appstore success, significant investments are pouring into the appstore world. In parallel, the debate over apps vs. mobile web is intensifying. The implications of the transition will be significant on the ecosystem on many levels.

2010 will be a critical year on many fronts. As usual, we will be keeping a close eye on the trends in the wireless data sector in our blog, twitter feeds,future research reports, and articles. The next US Wireless Data Market update will be released in May 2010. The next Global Wireless Data Market update will be released in Sept 2010.

Your feedback is always welcome.

Thanks.

Chetan Sharma

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this note are our clients.

The US wireless data market grew 5% Q/Q and 24% Y/Y to exceed $11.8B in mobile data service revenues and thus exceeded $10B for each of the four quarters in 2009. For the calendar year 2009, the overall mobile data revenues for the US market grew 29% ending at $44 billion for the year (1% shy of our $44.5 billion estimate). For the calendar year 2010, we expect a 20% increase in mobile data service revenues accounting for over $53 billion in service revenues.

Verizon Wireless edged past China Mobile to become the second biggest mobile data operator by revenues.

The US subscription penetration was approximately 92% at the end of 2009. If we take out the demographics of 5 yrs and younger, the mobile penetration is 99%.

The messaging volume increased 7% from last quarter catapulting US as the number one texting nation by messages/user/month going past the long-time leader Philippines.

For the first time in the history of the US wireless industry, the data traffic exceeded voice traffic for the full calendar year. With almost 400 terabytes of data traffic, it exceeded voice traffic by a significant margin. We expect that the ratio between the two traffic sources is going to double in 2010.

Apple continued its iTunes juggernaut and if measured by billing relationships (of course not all accounts are mobile) Apple is now the 10th largest mobile operator in the world.

Q4 2009 reported a 5.9% increase in GDP compared to the 3.5% increase in Q3 when the recession technically ended. While the overall economy is sputtering towards growth, wireless industry in the US remains vibrant as is evident by the increase in revenues and net-adds which jumped more than 5 million for the first time in 2 years.

What to expect in the coming months?

Christmas quarter generally yields best results of the year. Though the US mobile industry came out pretty unscathed from the recession, it will benefit from the improving economy. As such we expect the US mobile data service revenues to gain 20% to reach $53 billion in 2010. Mobile data will continue to be the engine of growth for the ecosystem providing at least 33% of the overall service revenues by the end of 2010.

The furious cycle of device releases is accelerating and one wonders if the longevity of each device is starting to shrink as even the hit devices like Droid and Nexus One are not allowed enough room to fully capitalize on their initial momentum. The app economy has been expanding as well. Part strategic, part hysteria, everyone is jumping into the pool to tap into the app river to pull in some revenues or use it more strategically to sell more devices, services, or advertising. (Stay tuned for more research on the subject in the coming days)

Microsoft is attempting a comeback with its 7 series devices though the delay in handset release as well as the lack of backward compatibility gives enough time for competitors to plan their moves. We are glad to see the industry going past the “PC like icons” for mobile phones (something we have advocating for more than 10 years, most recently in our paper “The Untapped Mobile Data Opportunity.” This will enhance user experience and help in extracting true value out of the mobile devices.

From the various announcements this year, we can expect an action packed 2010. However, it will be also an year of shakeouts with several key M&A transactions that will winnow down the competitive landscape in many segments.

Q1 2010 will also be important from the regulatory point of view with the national broadband plan being unveiled later this month. With the looming spectrum shortage, regulatory bodies can have a significant impact on the competitiveness of a nation. For example, in India, regulators haven’t been able to get their acts together for the past 3-4 years and its citizens continue to suffer from 2G. Similarly, many countries in South America have imposed unnecessary spectrum caps. The industry and regulators need to work hand-in-hand to make progress beyond speeches and paperwork.

To start planning for 4G, 5G, and beyond, US should think about rolling a 50 year broadband plan. While more spectrum is always helpful, will we have all the spectrum we need in 2050? or do we need to invent new technologies and business models that use spectrum more wisely? This topic will keep the industry occupied for some time to come. (Former FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin will be headlining our Mobile Breakfast Series event on March 10th to discuss the Spectrum Crises).

2010 will also be the year of network expansion with HSPA+, WiMAX, and LTE all coming into play in the US. As we had anticipated last year, the mobile data traffic kept on growing disproportional to the revenues. At the end of 2009, the US mobile data traffic was almost 400 petabytes, up 193% from 2008. To truly tackle the problem head-on, industry will need to adopt a multi-pronged strategy to manage their traffic more effectively. We discussed mobile data traffic in much more detail in our popular paper "Managing Growth and Profits in the Yottabyte Era." We will be issuing an update later this quarter so stay tuned.

It is also good to see the mobile industry expanding into vertical segments like Health and Retail. More discussion to come on these topics.

We will be keeping a very close eye on the micro- and macro-trends and reporting on the market on a regular basis in various private and public settings.

Against this backdrop, the analysis of the Q4 2009 and 2009 US wireless data market is:

Service Revenues (Slides 8, 17)

The US Wireless data service revenues grew 5% Q/Q to $11.8B in Q409. Compared to Q408, the data service revenues grew 24%.

Verizon and AT&T accounted for 88% of the increase in data revenues in Q4 2009.

The US mobile data service revenues crossed $10B for all the four quarters and stays ahead of Japan and China by a distance.

AT&T experienced the most growth with over 7% increase Q/Q followed by Verizon at 5%.

Verizon’s data revenues exceeded $4B for the second straight quarter and is only inches behind the global leader of over 10 years NTT DoCoMo.

AT&T and Verizon now account for 69% of the market data services revenues and 62% of the subscription base.

The average industry percentage contribution of data to overall ARPU is now 29%. US market is likely to pass the 30% mark in Q1 2010.

Verizon edged past China Mobile to become the second biggest mobile data operator by revenue behind NTT DoCoMo. The top four US carriers are now a permanent fixture in the top 10 global operators by mobile data service revenues occupying #2, #4, #6, and #8 spot respectively. Apart from NTT DoCoMo and China Mobile, Verizon Wireless and AT&T are the only two other operators generating more than $3B in quarterly mobile data service revenues.

ARPU (Slides 9-12)

Overall ARPU decreased by $0.45. Average voice ARPU declined by $0.98 while the average data ARPU grew by $0.53 or 4%.

Verizon led in (blended) data ARPU with $16.24 followed by AT&T and Sprint. In terms of % contribution, all the top three operators exceeded the 30% mark (Verizon became the first operator to do so last quarter). T-Mobile ended the year with 22.2% of its revenue coming from data services.

Subscribers (Slides 13-15)

In Q409, in terms of net-adds, the US market reversed the trend of the last 8 quarters and increased net-adds by 85% Q/Q to add approximately 5.1M new subscriptions.

The messaging volumes in the US market now average almost 592 messages/subscriber/month thus becoming the number one texting nation going past Philippines.

In terms of net-adds, thanks to the boost from the iPhone, AT&T led for the third straight quarter with 2.7M net-adds, edging its friendly rival Verizon which added 2.1M net subscriptions.

T-Mobile and Sprint improved their net-adds from last quarter though it was primarily from the prepaid segment.

Applications and Services

Non-messaging services continue to grab 60-65% of the data revenues for the US carriers.

There are probably 18-20 sub-segments within mobile data services and consolidation looms. While the valuations are still high for rapid consolidation, we think that due to recession pressure, the M&A scene is starting to heat up esp. in mobile advertising with the acquisitions of Admob and Quattro Wireless.

The usage and data consumption trends are enabling carriers to accelerate their 3.5G/4G plans and develop long-term business and technical strategies.

Handsets

Nokia sold 129M+ units in Q4 2009 including 21M smartphones. Samsung again had a solid quarter with over 69M devices sold maintaining its market share at 21%. LG Electronics at 10%, Sony Ericsson at 4%, and Motorola at 4% rounded up the top 5.

The constant drumbeat of new devices continued with Droid, Nexus One, and the fabled iPad.

The growth in smartphone usage is also putting pressure on the networks which are not able to handle the load during peak times in certain cities thus forcing carriers to look for alternate strategies to satisfy the demand for broadband.

Policy and Regulations

Q4 was also notable for the FCC scrutiny of the wireless industry. In outlining the four key principles of a) looming crisis of spectrum shortage b) removal of red tape c) enforce net-neutrality and d) open Internet, things have already started to change in the US Wireless Industry. The US broadband plan is scheduled to be unveiled later this month and can set the tone of innovation and regulation in the coming years.

Open

The appstores battle is intensifying with OEMs and carriers are announcing their plans and some of them are opening their wares to woo the developer community. The number of non-operator appstores jumped 375% in 2009. In the midst of the appstores hoopla, Apple announced the passing of the 3 Billion download mark with increasing number of developers participating the ecosystem.

Data Traffic (Slide 16)

· For the first time in the history of the US wireless industry, the data traffic exceeded voice traffic for the whole calendar year. With almost 400 terabytes of data traffic, it exceeded voice traffic by a significant margin. We expect that the ratio between the two traffic sources is going to double in 2010.

Misc.

India continues to be the hottest market on the planet in terms of net-adds with (again) a world record-setting month in Jan 2010 with 19.9 million net adds. To give you a perspective, this is almost 1.5 times the number of subscribers US added in the whole year. It is like adding a Canadian wireless market every month. For the year 2009, India added 177 million subs vs. 106 million for China. Making money on the net-adds is a different proposition all together (more discussion on the international market in our global market update later this month)

Willcom, the small Japanese carrier that started the flat-rate unlimited phenomenon filed for bankruptcy last month.

Softbank of Japan looks set to be the first major operator (outside of Philippines) with more revenues coming from data services than voice.

We will be keeping a close eye on the trends in the wireless data sector in our blog, twitter feeds,future research reports, and articles. The next US Wireless Data Market update will be released in May 2010. The next Global Wireless Data Market update will be issued in March 2010.

Your feedback is always welcome.

Should you have any questions about navigating or understanding the economic and competitive icebergs, please feel free to drop us a line.

Thanks.

Chetan Sharma

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this note are our clients.

First things first. From all of us at Chetan Sharma Consulting, we wish you and yours a very happy, healthy, and prosperous 2010. Thanks to all who participated in our 2010 Mobile Predictions Annual Survey. We have found it is the best way to think about the trends coming our way.

Before we dive into the survey results, let’s do a quick wrap-up of the year that was. Well, since we just completed one heck of a mobile decade, let’s do a quick jog down the memory lane.

The Last Decade: 2000-2009

Each new decade brings its own consumer and technology trends. During the 2000s mobile cemented its place in the global society fabric, the use of mobility became addictive and pervasive, to be without mobile seemed a curse and innovation blossomed and took user expectations to new heights.

From a pure statistical point of view, the global mobile subscription penetration grew from 12% in 2000 to approximately 68% in 2009 - phenomenal by any measure. The overall revenues grew over 400%, the data revenue grew 32,600% and the total subscriptions grew 563%. NTT DoCoMo paved the way with the i-mode launch in 1999 and they were the operator to emulate throughout the last decade, leading every single year in data revenues, in new application and service revenue sources, and in innovation and risk taking. They tried to export the success to other regions with little reward but DoCoMo clearly led the industry in taking mobile devices where they have never gone before.

China and India were late to the party but during the second half of the decade caught up with the western world and eventually surpassed all nations becoming number one and two nations by subscriptions respectively. In 2006, China Mobile became the most valuable operator passing Vodafone.

Mobile devices went significant transformation as well. From the early Bluetooth, camera, and music phones to the iPhones, the Storms, and the Androids, the industry was transformed by the introduction of Apple’s iPhone in 2007. While Bluetooth, sleek designs, camera phone defined the first half of the decade, the second half was all about the applications and the mobile web. While Nokia dominated the entire decade in terms of the sales and profits, having missed the touch revolution, it leaves the decade a bit battered and a bit behind playing catch-up to the newcomers who profoundly disturbed the status quo.

Razr carried Motorola through 2006 when its global share peaked but was left to reinvent itself during the second half. It seems to have redeemed itself with the successful launch of Droid and upcoming Android devices. While many in the industry predicted RIM’s demise, the company has only gotten stronger and is looking good for the 2010s. The emergence of Samsung and LG as strong players in the mobile ecosystem was also a big story of the decade with Samsung increasing its share by 380% and LG by 575% becoming the number 2 and 3 players respectively.

While Microsoft’s Windows Mobile had an early start and the enterprise market share, it lost its way through several missteps and is on dialysis as we enter the new decade. One shouldn’t count WM out though but there is a lot of work to be done before it can capture the imagination of the ecosystem which has been sequestered away by iPhone and Android.

While many new application areas were introduced during 2000s, none was able to displace SMS as the leading app category by usage and revenues. However, it’s relative share has started to come down especially in North America and Western Europe.

As data usage grew, so did the data traffic bringing many data networks to their knees. We expect the data traffic consumption to only accelerate. Many people are underestimating the growth rates (as they did previously) and the strain the increase in consumption will put on the unprepared networks. Projector phones will take media consumption to a new level. Data management is going to be big business in the 2010s.

Overall, the mobile industry became a trillion dollar industry in 2008 and the data revenues are increasing in almost all regions. Voice is being commoditized at fast pace and that has put the traditional economics and ecosystem wealth distribution in topsy-turvy.

The US market also experienced tremendous growth with mobile data service revenues climbing 21,327% and becoming a mainstay in the mobile economy. In 2008 it crossed Japan as the most valuable mobile data market. US was late in adopting SMS but caught fire once American Idol started using it and even played a good role in the 2008 Presidential election in showcasing the power of mobile. Verizon started the decade being the number one operator and after trading places with Cingular and ATT grabbed the title back in 2009 (after the Alltel acquisition) to become the most dominant carrier in North America. Many smaller players competed by being innovative with Cincinnati Bell launching the fist UMA device, Sprint the first mobile eReader, and TMO launched the hotspot business which has now become an essential component of an operator strategy going forward.

Mobile is also replacing landline at a much faster pace than expected and within the first half of the new decade, we will have majority of the users using mobile vs. landline. Just like the last decade, this one starts with a new standard deployment of LTE that will keep operators and vendors busy throughout the decade. However, a lot of the developing markets will still be deploying 3G during the first half of the decade.

Infrastructure providers suffered the most in the decade bookended by the two recessions. Consolidation of giants (Alcatel Lucent, Nokia Siemens), bankruptcies of the famous (Nortel), and uprising of the upstarts (Huawei) pretty much defined the decade for the segment. Ericsson and Huawei enter the new decade from a strong position and looking to dominate the global markets.

The last decade was also marked by some prominent IP battles such as RIM vs. NTP, Qualcomm vs. Broadcom, Sony Ericsson vs. Samsung, Upaid vs. Satyam etc. (disclaimer: we worked on some of these cases and testified as an expert)

Here is our “subjective” list of movers and shakers of the last decade

2000-2009

2010-2019

Operator of the Decade

NTT DoCoMo

DCM led the way in almost all new category of apps and services. Its data service revenue was highest in each of the last 10 years

DCM will continue to lead along with KDDI and SKT. However, it might be the carriers with tremendous scale who will have the calling cards in the new decade. Watch for China Mobile, Vodafone/Verizon, Telefonica, Orange, Bharti, Unicom, Singtel

OEM of the Decade

Nokia

Nokia dominated in sales and revenues in each of the 10 years and while the last couple of years took some shine off its glorious past, the company nevertheless came out ahead

RIM, Apple, Nokia, Samsung

Smartphone OEM of the Decade

Apple

Smartphones as we know them were introduced by RIM but Apple defined the category and the subsequent ecosystem

This space will be very competitive with Apple still the gold standard to beat

Infrastructure Provider of the Decade

Ericsson

Its prime rivals struggled to stay afloat while Ericsson grabbed most of the revenues from infrastructure contracts and is very well positioned for the next decade

Ericsson is joined by Huawei as the two top infrastructure provider with Huawei giving tough competition for LTE contracts. ZTE and other Chinese infrastructure providers will also replace some of the incumbents

Nation that led in mobile data

Japan

This is a no brainer. Japan led with Korea a close second. Finland, UK also impressed

US, China, and India are well positioned to make an impression but most likely during the second half. Japan will still be a major player

Device of the decade

iPhone followed by Razr

iPhone impressed with form and function while Razr with its global sales making it a top selling device of all times

The field might get more crowded as all OEMs focusing on the smartphone category. However, OEMs who also focus on the 90% of the market w/o smartphones might win the top prize

The year 2009

Apple continued to dominate the headlines for the third straight year - whether it was the launch of 3GS or the upcoming introduction of the fabled tablet. Google too kept the ecosystem active. It has executed on its mobile strategy with brilliant acumen though causing significant consternation amongst its partners who it needs to be successful. It has been often misunderstood by competitors, regulators, and partners. Often, they have focused on Google’s tactics vs. its strategy. Look for these two players to be very aggressive as they try to fight for the mantle and the mindshare.

While Nokia leads the OEM space by a good distance, its momentum in the smartphone space left a lot of question marks. Motorola made a credible comeback with Cliq and Droid. Samsung and LG continued to innovate and expanded on their share of shipments and revenues.

India outpaced China in net-adds and crossed 500M though it is still quite behind China’s 750M. The M&A and the consolidation process became active in Asia with several of the big regional operators looking to flex muscles in the international markets. After several delays, China started deploying 3G while India again fumbled and postponed its 3G auction.

US mobile data market continued its pace in 2009 with each of the four quarters exceeding $10B in data service revenues. The gap between the top two operators and the rest grew to be the biggest in the decade and the industry weathered the recession with ease. There was a clear shift towards prepaid especially for Sprint, T-Mobile, and the tier 2/3 operators.

2009 was also defined by significant activity on the application front. With Facebook eclipsing 100M subscribers and Appstore exceeding 2.5B downloads, sky is the limit.

The year also saw an unprecedented growth in mobile data consumption. As we had predicted, for some of the networks, the growth proved to be a double-edged sword. Many in the industry are banking on LTE to help relieve the pain but will be surprised that depending solely on the upgrade strategy will not be enough. Declaring spectrum as a looming crisis, FCC also started tinkering with the mobile industry and the broadband plan.

Japan exceeded 90% in 3G penetration while US subscriptions ventured into the 90% territory. Most of western Europe is way past 130%.

All in all, a terrific year considering that we went through one of the worst recessions in a generation. As we bid goodbye to the last decade, Nexus One and iTablet only serve to whet our appetite of what’s to come.

On a personal note, we started our consulting practice this last decade as we were coming out of the bubble recession and have been fortunate to work with some of the brightest brains and companies in the global ecosystem. We also had a chance to work on some key initiatives that impacted the ecosystem in profound ways. Many thanks to our clients, colleagues, friends, and readers. We will be involved with many new initiatives over the next decade and are looking forward to the conversations through the research notes, books, speeches, panels, whitepapers, blog posts, facebook and twitter feeds, and more.

Thanks and Happy New Year. May the upcoming decade leave you happier, healthier, and more successful than the previous one.

As we eluded to earlier, 2010 will be a pretty eventful year from several perspectives: business models, user experience and expectations, ecosystem posturing, disruption, and friction. How are things going to shape up? What will be hot and what will fade into oblivion? How will competition shape up the new sub-segments?

We put some of the questions to our colleagues in the industry. We were able to glean some valuable insights from their choices and comments. This survey is different from some of the others in the sense that it includes industry movers and shakers participation. Executives and insiders (n=150) from leading mobile companies across the value chain and around the world opined to help us see what 2010 might bring.

It is hard to cover the mobile industry in 20 questions. As pointed out by our panelists, there are a number of other issues and opportunities that will help shape our ecosystem - monetization of social networks, augmented reality, the fight for mobile advertising dollars, continued impact of globalization, security and privacy, NFC, IMS, VoIP, enterprise apps beyond email, battery improvements, new interaction modalities, health risks of RF radiation, Mobile 3.0, LTE, single purpose devices, 3G in India, Bada, app vs web, developer turmoil, featurephones, smart grids, M2M, Chrome, etc.

However, be rest assured, we will be tracking these and much more throughout the year and sharing them through various channels.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed. We will be calling on you again next year. We are clearly living in "interesting times" with never a dull moment in our dynamic industry. It has been a terrific year for us here at Chetan Sharma Consulting and we are looking forward to the next decade and seeing many of you along the way.

We hope you enjoyed gaining from the collective wisdom. Your feedback is always welcome.

Be well, Do Cool Work, Stay in touch.

Thanks.

With warm wishes,

Chetan Sharma

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this note are our clients.

Now onto the 2010 Mobile Industry Predictions Survey Results

The panel comprised of movers and shakers from around the world

What will be the biggest stories of 2010?

Jan seems to be the Google Phone vs. Apple Tablet matchup. Our panel though voted for the continued growth in mobile data as the top story.

Have we recovered from the recession? (Please select one)

Majority thought we are out of it though some might still feel the pinch

Who will be the most open player in the mobile ecosystem in 2010? (Please select one)

Google has done a great job at maintaining its image as THE open leader

The last two years in the global mobile market have been truly sensational. Over 1 billion new subscriptions added, over 2 billion new devices sold, and over $300 billion in mobile data revenues. The number of new iconic devices each quarter is on the rise, the consumer engagement is at an all time high and the new startups and entrepreneurs are brimming with ideas and new products. Devices like the iPhone, Storm, Hero, INQ1, Mytouch, Cliq, Droid, N97 and others have captured the imagination of the media like never before. The smartphones or the integrated devices now account for approximately 9% of the global market. However, what’s often lost in the smartphone euphoria is the remaining 91% of the market and the significant opportunity of data-enabling these customers.

Operators who have focused on data services as their core service have benefited with high data Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). As we quickly transition into the hyper growth phase of mobile data services, players who are designing affordable devices and services with "mobile data" in mind are the ones who will benefit from a higher uptick in adoption and sustainable consumer loyalty. However, as operators have migrated from 2G to 3G, many have missed an opportunity to customize or introduce new services that take advantage of devices being mobile, interactive, and always available.

Traditionally, there has been a big gulf between the functionality of featurephones and the smartphones; however, there is an emerging category of devices that will provide the functionality of a smartphone for the price of a feature phone. Though the average selling price or the ASP of the smartphone has been dropping, the price is still high for a significant majority of the global subscriber base. Consumers who are looking for a sub $50 device still want to the access applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Google search, and make VoIP calls, etc.

In this paper, we will look at the opportunity to attract the 91% of the global user base into the mobile data ecosystem. We will quantify the opportunity, examine what this opportunity means to the mobile value chain specifically to the mobile operators and discuss the success factors to accelerate the migration of non-active data users into the data realm.

The US wireless data market grew 5% Q/Q and 27% Y/Y to exceed $11.3B in mobile data service revenues and thus exceeded $10B for the third straight quarter. As we mentioned in our Q1 2009 research note, given the strong growth in data revenues and overall service revenues, the worst is over for the US mobile industry. The US market touched 25% penetration of smartphones in Q3 2009, a new milestone.

While the flailing economy hit certain segments of the wireless ecosystem hard esp. the infrastructure and handset segments, consumers haven’t really pulled back on the mobile data overall spending. Additionally, the CAPEX spending has stayed strong in 2009 given the activity around 3G/4G deployments and trials. As expected, there was an increase of prepaid subscribers which dropped the overall revenues for some of the carriers. The US subscription penetration was approximately 91.3% at the end of Q3 2009.

As we mentioned in our last three research notes that this time around, the fate of the US mobile industry is more closely tied to the overall economy compared to the previous recessions. As the consumer sentiment improved over the last two quarters along with better than expected Q1-3 2009 earnings from corporations, the mobile industry is back on track. While the structural flaws in various industry segments remain, the outlook for the Q4 2009 and 2010 remains bright and we are expecting the overall data revenues to now increase by over 30% compared to 2008 with a record-setting Q4.

So, what does this mean? Well, the markets can still be volatile, but overall the market seems to be feeling better about the economy than it was in February. The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index though retreated from June is at a healthy 47.7.

What to expect in the coming months?

The high unemployment has slowed the growth in the data card segment but the smartphone consumers have more than picked up the slack. Also, as expected, there was a shift from postpaid to prepaid in some user segments. For example, for T-Mobile, prepaid accounts for almost 20% of their customer base compared to 17% from an year ago. The fight for the low-end customer is also having an impact on the traditional prepaid players and the price pressure is reducing their margins. It is quite likely that 50-60% of such consumers don’t go back to postpaid thus permanently lowering the ARPU base for such customers and carriers who have experienced more postpaid to prepaid shift will have to make up for the lost revenues elsewhere.

In fact, the churning in the last few quarters has distanced the top two (AT&T and Verizon) and the next two (Sprint and T-Mobile) by the biggest gap in the history of the industry. By the end of 2009, this gap will rise to 36% compared to 28% at the end of 2008 and 21% in 2002.The "Rest" category has essentially diminished from the market dropping from a dominant 43% market share in 2002 to 12% in 2009.

The trend of the landline replacement by Mobile continued in Q3 2009, now reaching almost 25%. In the third quarter, messaging growth slowed down. The messaging volume was up only 4% and messaging revenues were up 3% QoQ. With its expanding 3G network, T-Mobile like its peers has started to benefit from smartphone penetration reaching to 6% of its subscriber base. Overall, The increased use of smartphones and datacards is putting a pressure on carrier networks and accelerating their strategies to deploy LTE/WiMAX. We estimate that by end of 2009, the US mobile data traffic is likely to exceed 400 petabytes, up 193% from 2008. To truly tackle the problem head-on, operators will need to adopt a multi-pronged strategy to manage their traffic more effectively. We discuss mobile data traffic in much more detail in our paper "Managing Growth and Profits in the Yottabyte Era." We will have more on this subject in the coming days (You can also read our RCR Wireless columns on the subject - Defining Mobile Broadband and Solutions for the Broadband World).

We will be keeping a very close eye on the micro- and macro-trends and reporting on the market on a regular basis in various private and public settings.

Against this backdrop, the analysis of the Q3 2009 US wireless data market is:

Service Revenues (Slides 11-12, 17, 19)

The US Wireless data service revenues grew 5% Q/Q to $11.3B in Q209. Compared to Q308, the data service revenues grew 27%.

Verizon and AT&T accounted for 80% of the increase in data revenues in Q3 2009.

The US mobile data service revenues crossed $10B for the third straight quarter and stays ahead of Japan and China by a distance.

AT&T experienced the most growth with over 6% increase Q/Q followed by Verizon and Sprint at 5%.

AT&T and Verizon now account for 68% of the market data services revenues and 61.5% of the subscriber base.

The average industry percentage contribution of data to overall ARPU is now 28%. US market is likely to touch the 30% mark in 2009 though it might not quite eclipse it.

The top four US carriers are now a permanent fixture in the top 10 global operators by mobile data service revenues occupying #3, #4, #6, and #8 spot respectively. Apart from NTT DoCoMo and China Mobile, Verizon Wireless and AT&T are the only two other operators generating more than $3B in quarterly mobile data service revenues.

ARPU (Slides 13-15)

Overall ARPU decreased by $0.14. Average voice ARPU declined by $0.57 while the average data ARPU grew by $0.43 or 3%.

Verizon led in (blended) data ARPU with $15.59 followed by AT&T and Sprint. In terms of % contribution, Verizon exceeded 30% to become the first US operator to do so. It was followed closely by AT&T and Sprint respectively. T-Mobile also exceeded $10 in data ARPU for the first time.

AT&T experienced something unique - an increase in voice ARPU (for the first time in 10 quarters). The voice ARPU increased $.03 in Q3 2009.

Subscribers (Slides 16-18)

In Q309, the US market added approximately 2.7M new subscriptions down 1% from Q109.

The number of data subscribers has been on the rise with Verizon leading the way. At the end of Q309, 67% of US subscribers were using some form of data services.

The messaging volumes in the US market now average almost 568 messages/subscriber/month or at the frequency of almost a message/hour/sub thus reaching close to the messaging leader Philippines.

In terms of net-adds, thanks to the boost from the iPhone, ATT again led in Q309 with 2M net-adds, edging its friendly rival Verizon which added 1.2M net subscriptions. Sprint lost 565K.

T-Mobile lost customers for the first time in its history. It lost 77K customers in the quarter.

The 3G penetration in the US stays at a healthy 43% in Q309. Verizon led the pack while T-Mobile is slowly expanding its 3G coverage. The growth in 3G and smartphones is helping offset some of the downward pressure on the data revenues and overall ARPU.

The gap between the top two (AT&T and Verizon) and the next two (Sprint and T-Mobile) is at its maximum. By the end of 2009, this gap will rise to 36% compared to 28% at the end of 2008 and 21% in 2002.The "Rest" category has essentially diminished from the market dropping from a dominant 43% market share in 2002 to 12% in 2009.

Applications and Services

Non-messaging services continue to grab 50-65% of the data revenues for the US carriers.

The flat-rate pricing movement that was started by Willcom in Japan which moved to Europe became more prevalent in the US market with industry wide flat-rate pricing plans that included data. All the major carriers seem to be offering flat-fee access plans for most of the new smartphones being introduced in the market. Approximately 20% of the consumers have flat-rate data plans.

There are probably 18-20 sub-segments within mobile data services and consolidation looms. While the valuations are still high for rapid consolidation, we think that due to recession pressure, the M&A scene is starting to heat up.

The usage and data consumption trends are enabling carriers to accelerate their 4G plans and develop long-term business and technical strategies.

Handsets

Nokia sold 100M+ units in Q3 2009. Samsung again had a solid quarter with over 60M devices sold inching its market share to almost 21%. LG Electronics at 11%, Sony Ericsson at 4.9%, and Motorola at 4.7% rounded up the top 5.

The third quarter was again dominated by blockbuster launches of smartphones. Androids have been invading the industry en-masse and 2010 looks to be a terrific year for consumers and competition.

The growth in smartphone usage is also putting pressure on the networks which are not able to handle the load during peak times in certain cities thus forcing carriers to look for alternate strategies to satisfy the demand for broadband - usage billing, UMA, Femtocells, Hotspots, WiMAX, LTE, and others.

Policy and Regulations

· Q3 also marked the start of an intense FCC scrutiny of the wireless industry. In outlining the four key principles of a) looming crisis of spectrum shortage b) removal of red tape c) enforce net-neutrality and d) open Internet, things have already started to change in the US Wireless Industry. Google has played the game of Armadaian tactics with Kasparovian acumen. The impact of the codified principles (and the subsequent court battles) can have a significant impact on not only the US wireless industry but the global ecosystem as well.

Open

The appstores battle is intensifying with OEMs and carriers are announcing their plans and some of them are opening their wares to woo the developer community. In the midst of the appstores hoopla, Apple announced the passing of the 2 Billion download mark with increasing number of developers participating the ecosystem. The new functionality being released with 3.0 is taking the battle up a notch. The clear-cut business model of 30/70+ split is attractive to the long-tail of developers. While there is no dearth of applications, findability remains a challenge. Also, appstores are changing the monetization strategies for content and application developers.

The App vs. Mobile Web debate is getting intense. The evolution is pretty clear - for the applications that don’t require significant UI resources, it will be better to develop in for the browser, for intensive games, the native platform will be ahead of the browser advances. The location API access on the iPhone browser is breakthrough to have developers start thinking about the webapps. But, what does it do to the control points and the revenue models?

· While there has been much consternation around the word "Open," one is hard pressed to find a consistent definition what it might actually mean. One could provide access to one API and declare themselves an open heretic while others could end up opening up their business more than needed and yet be accused of being closed. Clearly, the degree to openness is in the eye of the recipient. There is no black and white, just shades of grey and that’s where the battles will be won and lost. In the end, it is all about "access" to the market and the "freedom" to earn profits. Rest is noise.

· It is worth debating as to what can be mandated to be open, do the rules apply just to the operators and OEMs, or we should extend the courtesy to software platforms, search indices, aggregated user profiles, billing engines, etc.

· It is also becoming obvious that we need to redefine the device categories. Featurephones are no longer dumb terminals, many empower the users with smartphone functionality. Devices like iPhone, Droid, Pre no longer fit the smartphone stereotype, they need a separate category for themselves - appphones, ddhmvcs (data devices that happen to make voice calls), platformdevices, mobilecomputers, geniusdevices, agilechips, astuteconceirge, you get the point.

Misc.

Not surprisingly, Venture capital market experienced a continued decline in 2009, with companies announcing $1.5B in financings vs. $3B for the same time period. (Source: Rutberg)

In a sign of convergence battles to come, T-Mobile’s @Home and various Femto cell initiatives are taking hold. Cable operators are also aggressively seeking triple-play by providing the wireless component of the service.

China crossed the 700M subscription mark in Q3. India crossed the 500M mark for telephone penetration (wireline + wireless) of which 472 are mobile subscriptions. In terms of net-adds, India has outpaced China for the last 16 months. The Indian market added almost 155M vs. 101M in China during the last four quarters. (more discussion on the international market in our global market update next year)

We will be keeping a close eye on the trends in the wireless data sector in our blog, twitter feeds,future research reports, and articles. The next US Wireless Data Market update will be released in Feb 2009. The next Global Wireless Data Market update will be issued in Mar 2010.

Watch out for our end of the year survey and commentary on global wireless markets and trends for 2010.

Your feedback is always welcome.

Should you have any questions about navigating or understanding the economic and competitive icebergs, please feel free to drop us a line.

Thanks.

Chetan Sharma

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this note are our clients.

Over the course of last year, I did 25 different events, all of them focused on mobile. However, there was one event that truly stretched my thinking and worldview and that was the “Future in Review” conference (see last year’s review here) hosted by Mark Anderson, CEO of Strategic News Service (SNS). It exposes one to multidisciplinary subjects from global warming to nuclear weapons, from oceanography to medicine, from mobile to cloud, from economics to space rockets, it’s all here, nicely packed in a 3 day conference.

FiRe 2009 started with a brilliant keynote address from Prof. Veerabhadran Ram Ramanathan, Distinguished Prof of Climate Sciences and Director who is quite possibly the most authoritative person on the subject of climate change. He started his work way back in the 70s, decades before Al Gore made it glamorous. He is the one who has been measuring the impact on our planet one measurement at a time. He took us through the journey of his career culminating with a stark warning and a message of hope.

Things have deteriorated to such an extent that if we don’t check the downward spiral, many of the significant sources of water such as the Gangotri Glacier in India will disappear in 10-15 years. If you stop and think about it - that’s just stunning and has calamity written all over it. If the source of Ganges disappears, the life that has built around the river for thousands of miles before it goes into the Bay of Bengal will be unsustainable. I grew up in Roorkee, a town on the banks of the Ganges, so the point hit home very strongly. I have been thinking about this issue since the PBS documentary “On Thin Ice” by David Brancaccio and Conrad Anker - one of world’s leading high altitude climbers. 75% of the world’s fresh water is stored in glaciers and at the current pace of destruction, within 15-20 years most will be severely depleted. And there are still people in high places who don’t get it.

It was not all doom and gloom but a ray of hope in his experiments that left us less depressed by the end of the keynote. He is working on a number of experiments to identify and cure the main sources of pollution and carbon in the atmosphere like the Project Surya to reduce air pollution and global warming by cooking with renewable sources. Or the unmanned drones (pictures above) to measure brown cloud particulate composition to get a handle on how pollution travels (did you know that it only takes 2-3 days for pollution in China to come over the US and then another 2-3 days to reach Europe and the cycle continues - pollution is flat and globalized - thinking that it is only a developed world problem or developing world problem is foolish, also foolish is waiting on the other party to move first).

Best wishes to Ram and his team to educate, illuminate, and find solutions to the toxic problem of our times.

(with Mark Anderson)

Next day we moved into the full-fledged conference mode with 30 min rapid fire sessions from 8-5. The morning started with Mark talking to Stephen Evans of BBC World Service (he is a great interviewer btw) about how we recover from the current crisis and if technology will lead the rebound? Answer is Yes! and we are already seeing signs of it and others in the industry like Bill Gates and John Chambers have been echoing the same thing as well. Later Mark interviewed Mark Hurd, CEO of HP who had a hard time sitting on his feet so the discussion was done standing up.

(Mark and Mark)

He emphasized that the future is in the packaging of software, services, hardware, and network rather than siloed solutions. Haven’t we heard that before. Hurd is a numbers guy and can recite P&L spreadsheet from memory. He suggested that we will see more of the same for the reminder of the year and that the services business is yielding good profits for HP now. There was also quite a bit of discussion on the latest buzz word “Cloud Computing,” what it means and how does everyone profit from it.

Several industry heavyweights like Werner at Amazon, Amitabh at Microsoft, Russ Daniels at HP were at hand to discuss what CC means to them. While there is a lack of industry consensus on the meaning, it more and more looks like the reallocation and redistribution of resources - physical and electronic in a manner that drives efficiency and cost reductions for startups to behemoths. From a consumer point of view, it will always be a blend of solutions that take into account the privacy and security of data. My recent hard drive failures has forced me rethink my backup strategy.

Later in the day, I had the privilege to host the only mobile session of the conference “The Future of Wireless Broadband” with five amazing panelists, Dr Fred Kitson, Corporate VP, Motorola, Chris Pearson, President, 3G Americas, Dr. Hugh Bradlow, CTO of Telstra, Dr. Rama Shukla, VP, Intel, and David Achim, President, SkyFiber. I have written about the subject in great detail over the last couple of years so it was great to bounce some questions to the best minds in the space. Highlights of the discussion:

Hugh, ever a purist, defined 4G as 100Mbps.

Not a surprise, but the latest surge of smartphones is causing the networks to panic and follow the upgrade path esp. for HSPA+, LTE, and WiMAX

Rama said that 4G is more about the business model than about the technology. A business model that enables and opens up the ecosystem at a low price thus fostering innovation and services in an accelerated way

Hugh added that it is also about the spectrum as what’s available and how it can be utilized for new services, new technologies, and new business models

Being a provider of the backhaul technology (a choke point in the network evolution), David discussed how the backhaul technology will need to be upgraded at an accelerated pace if we are to deliver 10Mbps+ speeds.

Fred brought in the perspective from the device and infrastructure provider and they are doing well with both WiMAX and LTE and that newer devices with much enhanced capabilities will drive more demand for bandwidth as well as the need to optimize applications to conserve batteries (which is another areas that needs innovation and breakthrough)

Chris gave a summary of the LTE efforts of operators around the world with folks like Verizon accelerating their rush to 4G due to end of lifecycle of EV-DO while others like ATT are pursuing a slightly slower approach trying to maximize the output from HSPA+.

Hugh has been playing with newer set of “alternate devices” like sensor networks, telemetry, projection glasses and so on and so forth and sees their importance in the growing ecosystem.

Australia is dedicating $43B to broadband expansion to 90% of the consumers in the country. An equivalent US investment will be close to $350B and we are investing $7B (stimulus package). As I have said before, the stimulus package was a huge missed opportunity and the govt. could have done much better.

The flat rate economy is not sustainable and something has to give in the future

The availability of broadband impacts consumer behavior and we are likely to see very diverse models and services emerge in the coming days

There were other host of areas I wanted to get into but you can only do so much in 30 minutes especially if you have great panelists. Wish I could have a day long session to discuss the nitty-gritty in much more detail. In any case, great panel and insights. Joe Sterling was at hand as well to do an artist rendition of our panel, art below.

As I mentioned before, the conference was filled with very interesting discussions like Ambassador Dennis Hays from Thorium Power discussing a world where the capacity of making nuclear weapons can be taken out of the nuclear materials to only focus on nuclear energy for energy purposes. Boy! won’t that change the geo-political dynamics. John Hagel talked about shaping strategy based on this recent HBR paper and his upcoming book on the subject.

Another highlight of the show is to gather the bright CTOs of leading corporations and give them a practical problem to solve like how to provide adequate safe water for future decades. Hosted by David Brin (cohost of TV ArchiTechs series), the panel delved into understanding the problem and delivering a framework for solutions. Not a typical session you see at a conference. Hey CTIA! how about putting together a problem solving panel for your next show?

I also was touched by the screening of the movie “The Cove” - winner of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award. More details here. Synopsis:

In the 1960’s, Richard O’Barry was the world’s leading authority on dolphin training, working on the set of the popular television program Flipper. Day in and day out, O’Barry kept the dolphins working and television audiences smiling. But one day, that all came to a tragic end.

The Cove, directed by Louie Psihoyos, tells the amazing true story of how Psihoyos, O’Barry and an elite team of activists, filmmakers and free divers embarked on a covert mission to penetrate a hidden cove in Japan, shining light on a dark and deadly secret. The mysteries they uncovered were only the tip of the iceberg.

It will change your perspective of how you view dolphins for ever and those trips to seaworld will be ever so more poignant filled with self-introspection. More power to the activists like Richard O’Barry and directors like Louie Psihoyos for opening our eyes and making a remarkable piece despite the challenge.

Another highlight of the conference is the interviews of top technologists and emerging startups by BBC’s Stephen Evans. Each gets a sound byte to wow the world (the session is streamed to 150M people). Highlights - Xerox - how can we solve legal cases with technology? Radar Networks - NOW is the unit of change. Vlingo - Speech is changing. IMANI-Ghana - SMS to prevent drug counterfeits, Cisco - virtual reality, voice, and data are the three different waves of innovation, the opportunity for collaboration is immense, Liberty - 5 yr projection 1Gbps wired, 100Mbps wireless peak throughputs, avg - 200Mbps for wired and 10Mbps for wireless, Microsoft - it will be the Chinese century, companies shouldn’t worry about protecting their marketshare in China but worry about protecting their share from Chinese players overseas, Smaato - Mobile Advertising is going to be the most prevalent business model in mobile, and SIMtone - make terminals dumb again and have the network cloud take care of everything.

The current financial crisis was also discussed at length. Many thought Europe is in denial and lack fundamental understanding of the crisis, that China and US are intertwined more than ever before and will have to work together to lead the world out of the crisis, India is largely untouched and better days are ahead thanks to the recent electoral results.

(Larry with Kamran, Mark with Elon)

Larry Brilliant suggested that the vaccines are the best investment in human history. Can’t argue with that one. He also suggested that the world should be thankful to Mexico for releasing the data early and often enough for other countries to take precautionary measures (sometimes to the extreme, I might add). They have suffered significantly and have been ridiculed but hopefully they serve as a lesson for the world in future pandemics.

If FiRe represents the best in multidisciplinary thinking, Elon Musk represents the rare breed of multidisciplinary entrepreneurs. The guy can shift from intricacies of electric cars to the design of rocket ships to solar energy with ease.

My best session was at Calit2. I think Larry Smarr has the best office with many 10Gbps links and coolest toys to play with, especially the 125Mpixel Hyperwall. It was also nice to interact with Michael Sims, Manager and Planner for the Mars Rover at NASA and his team using the network and the wall. You can see some cool images below. The second set of pictures are an image of human brain where you can pick out the single neurons with ease.

Also, interacted with the next generation surface and touch technology that uses pressure as an input as well. Below is me doing a destructive face surgery on a poor soul.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the 0-60 mps in 3.9s experience in Tesla Roadster. That car is a rocket.

Overall it was a great conference. I left more curious about more things. The conference also has an intimate feel to it where you can discuss burning issues with top experts and award winners over coffee, stroll, and meals. Registration for 2010 is open now.

The first time I spoke on the topic of Opportunities in the BRIC Mobile Markets in a conference setting was back in the summer of 2006 in Moscow at the inaugural Interop conference. At the time, BRIC mobile markets were just emerging to be a big force. Net adds in the four countries amounted to 159M in 2005, in 2008, just India and China exceeded 212M. In the first two months of this year, India alone has added over 28M subscriptions. We were amongst the first ones to forecast this tremendous growth that was going to shake up the global mobile markets.

Fast forward 3 years. I am putting together another presentation on the subject focused on India and China and the mobile opportunities in these markets. Interesting enough, some of the basics remain the same, and they have more to do with Business 101 than anything else.

The lure of a billion subscribers is quite tempting but these markets are not for the faint-hearted. If you go in without understanding the markets and how business is done, you will be spit out of the market in no time. The fate is similar for big and powerful players like Vodafone to small startups you may have never heard from. Companies like Real Networks who have had success worldwide learned the hard way that these markets are no walk in the park.

Here are some of the factors, IMHO, that any company needs to keep in mind before spending too much energy in these markets. They are:

Understand the market by spending time on the ground: Many a times, companies think they can enter the market from a distance, parachute some executives, and things will fall in place. Rarely are things that simple. One must spend time in the markets with potential customers, suppliers, partners, analysts, and others to get a “real” grip of the market.

Perseverance: The customers in India and China can wear you down and if you have the enough strength to last long, you are likely to be rewarded. That’s one of the reasons, even some of the stronger players didn’t succeed but smaller players like Venturi Wireless (Disclosure: VW is a client of ours) have done well with carriers in these markets.

Build Relationships: Relationships and trust matters more in Asia than in the western markets. If you have spent enough time building relationships with key companies, suppliers, individuals, it might take a long time, but in the end, that’s are what is likely to pay off.

IP Protection: IP has a different meaning in these markets. It is not enough to just file patents, technology must also be protected or else the probability of it being copied are high.

Hire local: To be successful, it is rare that you can manage and operate from afar. It is not only inefficient, it is also a risky proposition. You have to be close to the customer. Hiring local talent who understands how business is done and when “yes” actually means “yes” is critically important.

Amazon is slowly but surely trying own the eBook market and has done well with its cautious Kindle launch. However, to have the platform universally adopted, there are still a number of short comings and challenges.

Price - It is still $160 overpriced. Not a mass market device just yet.

Book economics - There will be resistance from the publishers - the reach of the platform is not there so they are making it up in volumes

Apple - iReader could blow out Amazon off the market if it doesn’t secure the market quickly

Google - They are getting the content digitized, they have the OS, they have the OEM partnerships, they have the biggest reach available to mankind, they have the analytics, they can deliver a knock-out blow

Amazon IMHO is making the classic market-reach miscalculation. They should go aggressive in seeding the market with the device and make money on the downloads. The bigger reach will enable them to experiment with some really interesting advertising business models as well.

My event calendar this year started like last year - with a trip to Vancouver to attend Pacific Northwest Wireless Summit (PNWS) - the best wireless conference in Canada (18 and 19 Jan) . The weather was clear and sunny for a change, the drive beautiful, and the views from the conference rooms just drop-dead-gorgeous. The first day was Leadership summit where over 50+ C-level executives participated in discussing the state of affairs in the wireless industry and how to respond to the slumping economy.

Canada seems to be hit much harder than US by the slumping economy especially eastern Canada with the likes of Nortel struggling to survive.There were several interesting presentations and discussions. Some of the comments that stood out -

Steve Morley (former VP Qualcomm) - Qualcomm didn’t have any patents, any strategy, any product plan, any VC money but had a good group of people who figured things out. So, entrepreneurs shouldn’t feel disheartened and go with their dreams. The things that will get traction are - productivity tools, things that provide comfort, social connection tools, and simplifiers.

Wang Jing (Chair TD-SCDMA Forum, China) The ultimate battleground is LTE, TD-SCDMA is just a stepping stone to 4G. The mobile data market won’t pick up for the next 2 years

Laurence Dunbar (Partner, Fasken Martineau) Regulations can create new opportunities for new players and incumbents alike but it is important to understand the implications

Howard Donaldson (VP Disney) - It is very important to capture IP to maximize returns

I also moderated a panel on Global Opportunity - where are the opportunities and how to capture them. It is clear that certain segments are getting hit hard like Infrastructure and handsets, operators are also cutting back. Consumer data spending is still strong in the North American market as was evident form the strong AT&T and Verizon Q4 numbers. China and India are finally going 3G and some of the biggest contracts will be doled out.

China is pursuing a three technology strategy with China Mobile with TD-SCDMA, China Telecom with CDMA2000, and China Unicom with WCDMA. On the TD-SCDMA, China is trying to attract traditional OEMs to supplement Chinese OEMs but will the big boys invest in a technology that might not too long? To avail international opportunities, one has to understand the local market perfectly before jumping in. Despite the nuclear winter, there are new opportunities surfacing in various parts of the globe.

Next day, the full conference was in full flow with 6 interesting and diverse keynote addresses and panel discussion. Soundbites (courtesy PNWS)

During the session on Mobile Advertising, I presented my thoughts on the state of affairs of the mobile advertising ecosystem

I also wrote a small piece for the PNWS newsletter (below) based on our annual mobile predictions survey.

The best guesses for 2009It’s that time of year again; time for predictions and forecasts for the year ahead. Chetan Sharma gives you some ideas based on the annual mobile survey conducted by Chetan Sharma Consulting with industry execs. Don’t miss Chetan live at PNWS where he will give you the inside track on mobile advertising and give you some insight on what consumers are thinking.

Despite the tough economy, overall, the mood is still optimistic that the mobile industry might be able to weather the storm a bit better than some of its counterparts.

There is predicted growth in prepaid subscriptions in the North American market.

Acceleration in the declining mode of downloadables already visible over the last few quarters.

The increase in the subscriber base will nullify the loss in data subscriptions, with the caveat that if the job loss rate increases substantially, there might be a flattening of data revenues in Q109 and gradual decline over the course of the year.

Continued growth in 3G and smartphone penetration especially in the western markets

Voice ARPU will continue its downward trend and data ARPU will become a more dominant factor of the overall ARPU mix by the end of 2009.

Wireless data is likely to help in carrying the wireless industry through these tough times; the global percentage contribution from data is likely to exceed 25% by the end of 2009.

OPEN will continue to be the buzzword for 2009 and Google is likely to set the agenda on “open” for others to follow.

While the overall advertising budgets will shrink, mobile advertising ad-spend will keep increasing from the 2008 levels. Targeting capability is increasing and CPMs are coming down making for a more efficient mobile channel for advertising. Brands are falling in two camps: one who are scaling down on inefficient channels like print and radio and moving money into digital including mobile and the others who don’t have quite the appetite for mobile and want to keep investing in channels that they are most comfortable with.

After many years of delay, India and China will finally start investing in 3G deployments with China focusing on TD-SCDMA/WCDMA and India on WCDMA.

Plans for mobile payments will get pulled back a bit due to economic crisis. Limited trials and rollouts will continue in western Europe and North America.

Infrastructure players are amongst the worst hit in the wireless ecosystem. Players like Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent, and others are suffering. Will they continue to exist in their existing form or will a Chinese player see an opportunity to acquire them? Handset market is also seeing resetting of the landscape with the Korean manufacturers rising above Motorola to be counted amongst top three. The biggest infrastructure contracts will come from China and India this year but the majority of the $50B budget will be spent on TD-SCDMA equipment so the opportunity might be limited to local vendors with minor participation from global players.

Tough economic times are also ripe opportunities for M&A. Companies with cash will be able to swoop the struggling players who don’t have runway to survive 2009-10. We are likely to see several transactions and fire-sales.

Finally, though venture money is scarce, bear markets also give birth to new business models, new companies, new darlings of the wall street, and completely new opportunities and value propositions that weren’t envisioned before. Overall, consumer mobile data spending is expected to stay strong through this time economic cycles.

Being involved in the wireless industry for almost 15 years, I used to follow the works of the legendary Mark Weiser, founder of the Ubiquitous Computing (UC) group at PARC and father of Ubiquitous Computing in general. His works and words have inspired many in the industry including me.

In fact, in 1999, when I was picking a name for our wireless practice at Luminant, Ubiquitous Computing was on the top of my list but I found myself explaining it the industry. We gradually changed to Pervasive Computing (which was also chosen by IBM around that time). People still found it hard to grasp the meaning, so I reluctantly changed (IBM also started de-emphasizing PvC) it to “wireless practice.”

Anyway, it was an absolute thrill and an honor to interact with the folks at UC at PARC and moderate a panel at PARC. There is so much computing history at PARC that even the walls seem to whisper UC.

presenting different points of view regarding LBA. These guys have been around the block with location and advertising so it was a good spirited discussion. I have great respect for Ujjal (before Rhythm, he used to be CMO of Airtouch responsible for $250M/yr advertising budget), he has good insights into how advertising is bought and sold. Unlike the other panelists, Ujjal wasn’t particularly bullish on the LBA opportunity in terms of size and scale and thought it will be at best a niche play.

David talked about some interesting campaigns they have been launching on portable navigation devices from Garmin. Blair and Ilan talked about the differences with online targeting and how location targeting can improve performance. Brian from Useful Networks (I like the tag line - we take the BS out of LBS, neat!) gave some information about their European trials. Their role as location aggregator is being received well and they will have some numbers to announce next month in Barcelona.

Privacy was a common theme for the panelists, something that has to be done right or else the industry risks the regulatory hammer. We covered quite a bit in a short amount of time, yet there was still so much to discuss.

Extensive travels over the past few weeks has afforded me the opportunity to catch-up on my reading. One of the books i recently finished was Laser: The Inventor, the Nobel Laureate, and the 30 year patent war by Nick Taylor. If you are an inventor or have anything to do with patents, or just want to understand the intricacies of the legal system, this book is highly recommended. I deal with patents and IP all the time so found the narrative especially engaging.

Nick Taylor has done a superb job of capturing the life and Gordon Gould, a young scientist who invented Laser but couldn’t quite get the credit for more than 30 years. He eventually prevailed towards the end of his life. His story is inspiring and just breathtakingly fascinating. It was so captivating that I didn’t want my flight to land until I had finished the book. The details captured by Nick are so fine that it makes you feel you have a front seat of the drama that unfolded over the course of three decades. It has a good ending as well. Good and honesty prevailed. I am surprised no one has made a movie out of his life.

Global Wireless Markets continued to grow rapidly especially in India and China where the carriers are adding over 9M new subscriptions every month. India crossed the 300M subscription mark in Aug while China whizzed past 600M in September. Overall, the global subscriptions penetration edged past 50%. During the 1H 2008, revenues further tilted towards data services. The overall global mobile revenues (including equipment) for the year are likely to reach the 1 Trillion dollar landmark later this year (enough to bailout an economy or two), with approximately $800 billion attributed to service revenues. Data revenues now account for almost 20% of the global service revenues.

For some leading operators, data is now contributing close to 40% of the revenues however increase in data ARPU is not completely offsetting the drop in voice ARPU for most operators. From the true and tested SMS messaging to the new services such as Mobile Advertising, Social Networking, Commerce, Mobile Wallet, and others, different services helped in adding billions to the revenues generated for 1H 2008. Japan remains the envy of the global markets and the nation to study and learn from w.r.t. new services and applications. The US market expanded its lead over Japan in mobile data service revenues for the year and is unlikely to cede ground in the months to come.

Buoyed by the global launch of iPhone, Apple is likely to eclipse the 10M goal in Q308. Its App-Store launch along with Android’s imminent arrival dominated the news. Other manufacturers also introduced challengers to iPhone, most notably, Instinct by Samsung on the Sprint network which has also been quite successful in getting users to engage in data services.

WiMAX vs. LTE debate took over the EV-DO vs. WCDMA chatter and while majority of the industry is consolidating around LTE; open-platform advocates are watching the arrival of WiMAX in the US with great interest. Google, Sprint, Motorola, TWC, Comcast and others put new life into the experiment called Clearwire.

Chetan Sharma Consulting conducted its semiannual study on the global mobile data industry. We studied wireless data trends in over 40 major countries - from developed and mature markets such as Japan, Korea, UK, and Italy to hyper growth markets such as China and India.

This note summarizes the findings from the research with added insights from our work in various global markets.

The global mobile markets continue to grow at an explosive pace reaching 3.6B subscriptions by 1H08 up 9% from EOY 2007 levels and will likely cross the 4B mark by the end of 2008. Significant growth is coming from India and China with both countries registering on an average 9M net adds per month. India and China combined to add approximately 107M new subscriptions during the first six months of 2008. Overall, the world market is now over the 50% penetration mark.

US edged past Japan again as the most valuable mobile data market in service revenue with US adding $15.7B vs. $13.6B for Japan in 1H08 mobile data service revenues. China with $7.8B was ranked number 3. US registered the highest growth amongst the top 3 with over 18% increase from EOY 2007 levels followed by China at 9% and Japan at 7%. These top 3 markets account for just under 50% of the mobile global data service revenues.

NTT DoCoMo continues to dominate the wireless data service revenue rankings with over $6.8B in service data revenues for 1H08; however, Q/Q growth is declining. DoCoMo crossed 84% in 3G penetration and is expected to touch 90% by end of the year.

DoCoMo was followed by China Mobile, KDDI, Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, China Unicom, Softbank, O2 UK, and T-Mobile USA to round up the top 10 operators by wireless data service revenues. It marks the first time, T-Mobile USA enters the top 10 list as it went past SK Telecom. All the top 10 carriers exceeded $1.5B in data revenues for the first half of 2008.

For the last couple of years, NTT DoCoMo has been the only carrier exceeding $10B in yearly mobile data revenues. In 2008, it is likely to be joined by China Mobile, KDDI, Verizon Wireless, and ATT in the exclusive 10B club.

Data revenues for the top 10 operators increased 10.3% from EOY 2007 and now account for almost 50% of the global mobile data revenues though their subscriber share is around 30%.

Most of the major operators around the world have double digit percentage contribution to their overall ARPU from data services. Operators like KDDI, DoCoMo, and Softbank are approaching 40%. 3 UK, O2 UK, Singtel, and 3 Sweden exceeded 30%.

In March, India edged past the US to become the number two wireless market (by subscriptions) in the world. In last two years alone it has added almost 175M new subscriptions (in comparison China added 169M and the US market added 39M).

ATT reported the highest increase in data ARPU from 2Q07 with 32% growth. Other notable percentage increases in ARPU were from KDDI, DoCoMo, Softbank Japan, 3 Australia, Vodafone Italy, Rogers, Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile Austria. The biggest drop in percentage terms were registered by the Indian operators with average data ARPU dropping to $0.65.

In 1H 2008, SMS’s vice like grip on data revenues continued to loosen a bit with many carriers seeing an increase in non-SMS data revenues. On an average, Japan and Korea have over 70-75% of their revenue coming from non-SMS data applications, US around 50-60%, and Western Europe around 20-40%.

Most of the operators in developed nations are contemplating future strategies to boost data revenues such that decline in voice revenues is at least compensated for. There are very few operators who have experienced increase in overall ARPUs. Comparing the ARPU for last 2 years, amongst the top operators, only Singtel, Rogers, T-Mobile UK, O2 Germany, O2 UK, Verizon Wireless and ATT experienced increase in both overall and data ARPU.

NTT DoCoMo has been at the cutting edge of the mobile data evolution by creating new markets and exploring new technologies and social experiments ahead of almost anybody else in the market. We looked at the data revenue growth at NTT DoCoMo since the introduction of i-Mode almost 10 years ago (see slide on page 17). During the last 9 years, overall ARPU has declined 33% though data ARPU increased over 1800% and now accounts for almost 40% of DoCoMo’s service revenues. The voice ARPU has declined almost 60%. Our long history with the Japanese and Korean markets has taught us that while the individual strategies in each market will differ, one should study the trends and technologies in these markets to get a sense of what’s coming.

The biggest percentage contribution by data ARPU has been consistently registered (since mid 2002) by two Philippines carriers – Smart Communications and Globe Telecom with over 66% (or $3) contribution coming from the data services. Philippines is also one of the most active messaging nations where users average a message/hr round the clock.

Even though China reported approximately $7.8B in data revenues for 1H08 and the percentage contribution is over 27%, data ARPU is around $2.3. For India, data ARPU continues to stay below $1 for all major carriers with Reliance experiencing a 50c data ARPU during Q208.

China Mobile with 428M (as of Aug 08) remains the #1 carrier in terms of total number of subscrptions followed by Vodafone at 269M and China Unicom with 171M subscriptions. Telefonica, América Móvil, SingTel, Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), and Orange (France Telecom) are the next five largest telecom groups in the world. In terms of individual carriers in a given country, AT&T and Verizon Wireless occupy the #3 and #4 spot respectively ahead of NTT DoCoMo, which is at #5 (Verizon will overtake ATT after its Alltel acquisition goes through later this year). The two Chinese carriers round up the top two positions and are likely to stay perched at their lookout vistas for many years to come.

China Mobile remains the most valuable telecom operator with over $200B in market cap. It is followed by Vodafone at around $125B. Telecom groups in mature markets are under enormous pressure to either come up with a global expansion strategy or accelerate their existing plans. Carriers in Japan and Korea are the most under duress.

As far as 3G is concerned, there were over 350M 3G users (69% of them are WCDMA users vs. EV-DO). Both Japan and Korea continue to expand their 3G base with both reporting over 80%+ penetration. 3G has picked-up steam in both western Europe and North America per our forecast in the 2005 cover story article “3G: Hitting the Mass Market” published in the Wireless World Magazine. Western Europe and US are at approx. 30% 3G penetration (Italy being the exception exceeding 40%).

China and India represent the biggest opportunities for the Infrastructure providers. China postponed its 3G decision again and couldn’t launch a network for the otherwise wildly successful 2008 Olympics. India is also going through its 3G spectrum policy and is likely to resolve some of the contentious issues shortly. Some of the biggest infrastructure contracts will come from these two countries that are looking to expand coverage into rural areas.

Carriers with nationwide 3G networks and good distribution of handsets are seeing strong uptick in data ARPU. The Japanese and Korean carriers along with operator 3, Verizon, Sprint Nextel are all seeing benefits of rolling out their 3G service. Deployment of 3.5G technologies such as HSDPA and EV-DO Rev A (and B) is also gaining momentum. Networks are getting deployed and market is being seeded with some of the early handsets. For 4G, there is a strong momentum behind LTE, proponents of WiMAX are pushing the technology as a 4G candidate, and though it is starting to lose its time advantage, all eyes are on the imminent Clearwire launch.

In terms of applications, messaging accounts for the lion-share of data revenues. However, other services such as Mobile Music, Mobile TV and video streaming, Voice navigation, PNDs, Mobile Games, IMS, LBS, Mobile advertising, and others have also captured industry’s imagination. Alternate devices with wholesale cellular agreements are also flooding the market. In Japan, Mobile Commerce is expected to do much better than the other hot category - Mobile Advertising. Though not much talked about, enterprise applications are also being adopted widely esp. in North America as more workers become mobile and corporations seek efficiencies in their operations and supply-chain.

1H 2008 saw the demise of the last standing next-generation MVNO in the US market - Helio, which got sold to Virgin Mobile at bargain basement prices. In Europe, Blyk continues to make good progress with its unique mobile advertising-based model. Asian market is also opening up for MVNOs.

Nokia eclipsed 100M/quarter unit sale in both the quarters thus far. It has sold over 237M handsets in 2008, more than the next three handset manufacturers combined. Nokia’s global market share edged past 41%. Samsung at 15%, Motorola with 9.5%, LG with 9.3% and Sony Ericsson with 8% rounded out the top five. For the year, the industry looks to again eclipse the 1 billion handset mark for 2008.

While the talk of “Open Access” and “Open Platform” consumed much of North America, it barely registered a decibel elsewhere. Several significant events including 700 MHz Auction, Android, and Verizon’s “Open Network” initiative elevated the consternation in the ecosystem. Apple launched its 3G iPhone while Android’s first device is slated to see the light of day next month courtesy of T-Mobile USA.

Apple launched its App-Store with iPhone 3G which has been quite successful though there is significant clutter to muddle through. The company is likely to announce soon that it eclipsed its 10M goal in Q308, a full quarter earlier than the stated target. These days, any new device that gets launched in the market is looked through the prism of iPhone.

In the last 10 years, the growth patterns in the mobile industry have completely reversed. In 1998, the developed world accounted for 76% of the subscriber base, in 2008; the percentages have flipped with developing world now accounting for 76% of the subscriber base and are likely to increase to 85% by 2018 (see slide 8). For a more detailed analysis, check out our research paper sponsored by The United Nations Foundation on “Mobile Services Evolution: 2008-2018.” It was presented at The Rockefeller Foundation Healthcare summit in Bellagio, Italy in July 08. (Note: The dichotomy between developed and developing nations is a very simplified concept that has been around for about 50 years. It is clear that a transformation in the distribution of wealth worldwide will change the picture in the next 10 years. Countries that are considered developing in today’s definition will become economic superpowers in 10 years and more dominant than some of the developed nations, even if they have not caught up then with some in terms of GDP per capita. However, for purely the purposes of comparison and illustration, we are using the existing definitions to discuss the shift in the mobile ecosystem).

Several operators reported Mobile Advertising as their key strategic focus for the coming quarters, esp. China Mobile and Vodafone. Sensing the opportunity to seek new sources of revenue stream, Nokia and Google are getting active in the space as well. 2007 saw tremendous M&A activity in both the online and mobile advertising space and while it slowed down during 2008, it is likely to pick-up again in 2009 as consolidation looms.

Wireless Broadband continues to be a significant growth driver for the industry. We partnered with our good friend Vern Fotheringham - a true industry entrepreneur and who has been behind many of the industry firsts, to write an exhaustive treatment of the subject in our upcoming book - Wireless Broadband: Conflict and Convergence being jointly published by IEEE Press and John Wiley (see below). Details forthcoming.

Your feedback is always welcome.

Thanks.

Chetan Sharma

Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this note are our clients.